The Romantic Paradox

Love, Violence and the Uses of Romance,

1760–1830

Jacqueline M. Labbe
 he Romantic Paradox

10.1057/9780230596764 - The Romantic Paradox, Jacqueline M. Labbe

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A/50 by Jacqueline M. Labbe and from the same publisher
ROMANTIC VISUALITIES: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism

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10.1057/9780230596764 - The Romantic Paradox, Jacqueline M. Labbe

The Romantic Paradox
Love, Violence and the Uses of Romance,
1760-1830

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Jacqueline M. Labbe
Senior Lecturer
University of Warwick

tA
10.1057/9780230596764 - The Romantic Paradox, Jacqueline M. Labbe
 First published in Great Britain 2000 by
flfl MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0-333-76032-8

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First published in the United States of America 2000 by
flfl ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, LLC,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 0-312-23412-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Labbe, Jacqueline M., 1965—
The romantic paradox : love, violence and the uses of romance, 1760-1830 /
Jacqueline M. Labbe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-23412-0
1. English poetry—18th century—History and criticism. 2. English poetry—19th
century—History and criticism. 3. Romanticism—Great Britain. 4. Narrative
poetry, English—History and criticism. 5. Love in literature. 6. Death in literature.
7. Delia Cruscans (English writers) 8. Violence in literature. I. Title.
PR576.L7 L33 2000
821'.609145-dc21
00-023344

© Jacqueline M. Labbe 2000

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10.1057/9780230596764 - The Romantic Paradox, Jacqueline M. Labbe
FOR ROD, who unleashes the violence of my affections

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Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

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Introduction 1
1 Reviving the Romance: What's Love Got to Do with It? 11
Critical chivalry 16
The aesthetics of vicarious fear 31
2 Sexing the Romance: the Erotic Violence of the Delia
Cruscans 39
'Abortive thoughts that right and wrong confound' 39
The erotics of apostrophe: emotional bondage 43
Epistolary romance: Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda
anthologised 53
3 Failing the Romance: Coleridge, Keats and the Wilted Hero 67
En/Gaging the hero: Coleridge 73
Detumescence: Keats 84
4 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson, Hemans and Dead
Men 98
Deflected violence and dream-visions: Mary Robinson 103
Love with death: Felicia Hemans 121
5 Transforming the Romance: the Murderous Worlds of
Byron and Landon 135
The confusion and subversion of the natural order of
things': Byron 142
'Grief, disappointment, the fallen leaf, the faded flower,
the broken heart, the early grave': Letitia Landon 158
Notes US
Bibliography 201
Index 209

vn

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Preface and Acknowledgements

I began investigating the vagaries of the romance in 1993; the result

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was my first published article, 'A Family Romance: Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary Godwin, and Travel' (Genre 25 [1992], 211-28).
Arguing that the romance was the unrecognised but vital structural
element of Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's travel narratives started me
thinking: how many other Romantic-period writings depended on the
romance? And why were so many critics determined to apologise for
those very romances? The more I read, the more I saw the romance: in
plain sight, in the poems of Keats, Byron, Robinson and Landon; less
obvious but still essential to the poems of Coleridge, Hemans, the
Delia Cruscans. And the more I read, the stranger the Romantic
romance became: even as they relied on it, poets destroyed it. This
book represents my attempt to understand the matrix of romance and
violence that infiltrates Romanticism.
I have been assisted in my quest by various agencies. I am grateful
to the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield
for a research grant that allowed me to begin my research in August
1996 and for the sabbatical that allowed me to get down to serious
work; to the University of Sheffield Research Fund for a grant that
allowed a month's study in London in August 1997; to the British
Academy Arts and Humanities Research Board for the Matching
Research Leave Award that allowed me the luxury of an extra semes-
ter's leave in which to complete the book. I also thank the Editors of
the European Romantic Review for permission to reprint those parts of
Chapter 4 that appeared in Volume 10 (1999).
My greatest debts, however, are to those whose advice and assis-
tance have made this book a stronger, more resilient work. I am most
grateful to E.J. Clery, Kate Davies, Frederick De Naples and Jane
Hodson, all of whom read chapters and whose comments have helped
immensely. Dominic Shellard, the Labbe family, Duco van Oostrum
and Lisa Vargo have been patient listeners. Most of all, Rod Jones has
given me more than I can express, and this book is dedicated to him.
J.L.
Sheffield

IX

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Introduction

The romance has always had a bad press within Romanticism. As a

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genre, its associations with women readers and writers and assump-
tions of its inherent inferiority to, for instance, the epic, the ode, or
even the sonnet have for many readers contained its power; as a plot-
line, its fabled preoccupation with love and fantasy has limited its
appeal. The romance is rule-bound, immature, feminised and
predictable: readers know the outcome before the story even begins.
Its very familiarity underscores the fruitlessness of the reading experi-
ence - how can enlightenment reside in the heroic exploits of a lover
determined against all odds to rescue and win his love, the basic plot
outline of almost every romance? And how can intensity survive such
an overworked storyline? Surely the value of poetry - of Romantic
poetry - is its investigation of the new, the subtle, the subjective, the
personal and the many other abstracts attached to critical under-
standings of the period. How can we reconcile the rote nature of the
romance with the energy of Romanticism?
And yet such questions fail to appreciate that, as Stuart Curran
points out, 'the etymological root of Romanticism ... is romance'. 1
The romance and its parts infiltrate the period under discussion in this
book, about 1760-1830; readers witness not only the novel's embrace
of the romance plot (that is, sensibility), but, as this book discusses,
poetry's elaborate stockpiling of and investment in the romance. To
quote Curran again, 'it might be argued that the term by which we
retrospectively define the period simply honors the primacy of
romance in British poetry during this epoch' (129); indeed, each of the
Big Six - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Byron - wrote
romances or made use of the genre's constituent parts, but beyond
this we see that most poets of the period did so, whether simply,
through love lyrics, or more complexly, in full-blown romantic narra-
tives. Maybe more importantly, poets affirmed the centrality of the
romance by judicially selecting specific aspects to explore: the make-
up of the hero and his quest, for instance, or romantic love, or
chivalry. As the following chapters show, poets during the Romantic
period return repeatedly to the romance, mining it, choosing particu-
lars, eventually transforming it. And while Curran's indispensable
explication of this 'poetic form' traces the boom of the romance

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2 Introduction

revival to the early nineteenth century, as this book will show the
romance was being manipulated in poetry from at least the late 1780s
onwards. Curran dates the romance revival to 'the first decade of the
new century, [when] the actual romances were republished' (129), but
he is too meticulous: poets had been writing new romances, updating

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old ones, and interrogating its values for decades. As this book main-
tains, the romance reveals its essential outlines both explicitly (in the
work of Robinson, Keats, Byron and Landon) and more unexpectedly
(in the work of Coleridge, the Delia Cruscans, Hemans). For the poets
of this period, the genre mapped experience, and it provided the tools
for self-exploration.
The Romantic romance contains all the necessary ingredients,
although not always at the same time: a love relationship central to
the plot; a hero, heroine and villain; journeys, adventure and escapes;
the supernatural or magical. Importantly, however, it largely
dispenses with 'happily ever after'; lovers meet, love, are parted, but
seldom are reunited, and if they are, it is seldom to good effect.
Instead of celebrating their happiness, the Romantic romance utilises
their distress; it finds in the elements of the romance justification for
pursuing a changed romance. Rachel Brownstein has said that 'the
paradigmatic heroine of courtly love poetry and aristocratic romance
is a creature of art and idea ... she is the Ideal incarnate. Therefore, in
romance the Lover seeks her'. 2 In the Romantic romance, too, the
quest is organised more often around a construct than an object: the
hero seeks because he is meant to, and his quest exists because it must.
The heroine, however, is less the cipher Brownstein describes, at least
in the poems under discussion here that are by women. Instead, she
too becomes a questing subject, in search of the intangible, hampered
by the ethereal. Like the hero, she must negotiate the pitfalls of genre,
and like the hero, she must engage with the strictures of gender. For
an interesting corollary to romancing arises from the close study of its
mores and requirements this book conducts: gender, and gendering,
underpin its structure and unavoidably inform its concerns. In fact,
the social construction of sexualised behaviour and its attendant
expectations and assumptions emerge as vital to the Romantic
concept of romance. The poets under scrutiny in this study struggle
with gender through what they write about and how they write it. The
traditional romance is inherently deeply conservative in its gender
constructions; indeed, many gender stereotypes about strong heroes
and passive, beautiful heroines are directly traceable to its plot. 3 The
Romantic romance throws down a challenge to the romance of

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 Introduction 3

gender; subverting the familiar angles of plot, the Romantic romance

reveals the emptiness of generic rhetoric.
In this way, the Romantic romance disorders itself; it commits
crimes against genre, impairing the cliche of plot. This is the de
Manian 'violence of literary language' described by Adela Pinch: it

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'tropes and disfigures what we thought we knew, a counterspirit (to
borrow Wordsworth's words) that wastes and destroys'. 4 The romance
is put to violent use by its Romantic practitioners, and this is signalled
by the violence of the Romantic romance, by its increasingly overt
reliance on violent and deathly imagery during the period under
discussion. In two recent studies that have focused on different
aspects of the romance, David Duff's Romance and Revolution and
Laurie Langbauer's Women and Romance, violence operates peripher-
ally: Duff defines the romance through the image of the French
revolution, seeing it as a forum wherein revolutionary ideas can find
voice, while Langbauer charts the emergence of the romance in the
(mainly) nineteenth-century novel and links it to ideas of gender and
consolation. 5 Both of these valuable works, however, invoke the
romance only to relocate their critical emphases, reflecting a critical
discomfort with the terms offered by the romance as a genre. In re-
focusing attention on the romance itself, in exploring its engagement
with and exploration of violence and its culturally disruptive poten-
tial, this book forces a confrontation with the unremarked oddities of
Romantic romance.
Moreover, its very status as newly resurgent in the Romantic period
begs the question of why this is. One answer can be found in history:
alongside the antiquarian discoveries of the 1760s and the literary
endeavours of the 1780s onwards, there exists a cultural preoccupa-
tion and fascination with violence, war and death. The 1750s see war
with France over America; the 1770s and 1780s see war with America;
the 1790s and early 1800s see war with France. Of course, Romantic
poetry has often been discussed in terms of the French Revolution, but
the actual continuity of war from the 1750s is less often remarked. The
consolations, to borrow Langbauer's word, offered by a genre reliant
on reordering disorder, routing evil and rewarding valour are vast. The
rise of the romance must be contextualised historically, and its neces-
sary links to cultural unrest re-established. The loss figured by British
defeat in the American Revolution finds play in a genre that concerns
itself with military gains, and with a strongly positive national char-
acter - valorous, independent, chivalric. The challenge to British
sovereignty posed by the French Revolution, fears of a class war, and

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4 Introduction

the resultant government-sponsored cultural repression exists along-

side the increasing popularity of a genre that promised the
maintenance of certainties. The privations and unrest occasioned by
war with France are counterpointed by the poetry of medieval British
hardihood and nation-building. Interweaving romance and culture

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produces a tapestry of meaning, where genre answers a cultural need
and violence mirrors the cultural valence. If it is true that 'violence
and representation [are] truly interconnected' (Pinch 424) - and this
book presumes that it is - then the methodology of violence combines
with the representations of the romance to produce documents of
cultural unease.
Under this rubric it is interesting to note that while by the 1790s the
romance was re-established as a highly popular and widely used
generic form, this decade also seemed unable to confront its own use
of violence directly, substituting obscurity, indirectness and dream-
visions for more visible forms of violence. The disturbing fervour of,
and conflicting attitudes towards, the French Revolution and subse-
quent war with France as well as the unsettling novelties offered by
the proponents of the Rights of Man and Woman and the proto-
Machine Age offer one explanation. As the new century progresses,
and the romance becomes ever more popular and widespread, it also
gains the ability to engage directly with the violence its describes:
texts become metaphorically blood-soaked as human relations disin-
tegrate into an anti-fairy-tale world of dying unhappily every after.
What begins as dream-visions progresses to nightmares and culmi-
nates in a glamorisation of literary violence and an increasingly
flamboyant approach to romance.
As I have indicated, the Romantic romancers distinguish themselves
by a commitment to a kind of romance that picks up on historical
signals and cultural need. In their use of violence, they undercut
Langbauer's 'consolations of genre', offering a competing rhetoric:
violence both reflects culture and inflects it; its imagery engages with
a cultural trope and challenges it. Romantic romances perform on
multiple levels. They are salutes to a genre, recognisable, comforting
and entertaining; they are experiments with a genre, unsettling, odd
and compelling; they are subversions of a genre, rebellious, innovative
and transformative. They make incursions into the territory occupied
by competing genres: ballads, the novel, the Gothic. Romantic
romancers specialise in rewriting and delight in generic dismember-
ment. They find that the elements that make up a romance are
detachable and can be used outside the confines of genre; they find

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 Introduction 5

that elements can be privileged, overturned, or exposed. For this

reason, the romances under discussion in this book are not always
complete or fully formed; each chapter instead concentrates on an
aspect of romance, on its use-value, and on its interactions with or
celebrations of violence. Death figures frequently, but so does love:

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the eros/thanatos drive is gestured towards, if not fully articulated.
Even as poets tear the romance to bits, they reify its prominence, its
ability to speak to and of the time; its translation of cultural violence
into literary representation functions as an unacknowledged legislator
of Romanticism.
Readers and critics of Romantic poetry, then, find themselves
haunted by a spectral genre whose outlines have appeared too flimsy
to support the weight of Romanticism, and yet its continual return
belies its repression.6 Wordsworth, for instance, inserts romance into
his document of personal poetic philosophy, The Prelude.7 As is well-
known, the romance of Julia and Vaudracour partly disguises
Wordsworth's own romance with Annette Vallon; it allows him to
confess without actually revealing anything at all. But besides the
violence residing in his decision to literalise - that is, make literary -
his personal romance and thereby mask it, this interlude also illus-
trates Wordsworth's involvement in Romanticising romance. 8
Wordsworth deposits his romance in Book IX, 'Residence in France',
and leads up to it via images of courtly romance - maidens on
palfreys, knights jousting, satyrs, imprisoned damsels, convents
'dismantled ... by violence abrupt' (IX: 472)9 - combined with ex-
amples of the tyranny and poverty in present-day revolutionary France.
His 'chivalrous delight' (IX: 503) thus bound up with political repres-
sion, Wordsworth decides to 'draw from obscurity a tragic Tale' (IX:
551) to illustrate the need for revolutionary change. The story of Julia
and Vaudracour follows romantic convention, which its status as a
'Tale' emphasises: young love, stern parents, separation, reunion, final
separation. This is a tragic romance, but more than its lack of a happy
ending impedes its generic trajectory. Vaudracour transgresses the
conventions of courtly love when, 'through effect/ Of some delirious
hour' (IX: 596-7), or because of his frustration at his father's intransi-
gence, he impregnates Julia; already the romance is being challenged.
When Julia's parents send her away to hide her pregnancy, the prosaic
motive of shame intervenes in the meeting of true lovers. The most
fully realised romance character is Vaudracour's father, whose villainy
is undiffused: he operates, deus ex machina, outside of Vaudracour's
and Julia's romance to thwart it. The crystallising moment of violence

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6 Introduction

works simultaneously to prove the father's heartlessness and

Vaudracour's useless valour: set upon by his father's minions,
Vaudracour kills one, 'perilously' wounds another and gives himself
up to a third (IX: 675-84). After this, Vaudracour goes into romantic
decline; he passively accepts his fate, fails to rescue Julia from her

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convent fate, fails to persuade or placate his father, fails even to
protect his baby son, who, 'after a short time, by some mistake/ Or
indiscretion of the Father [Vaudracour], died' (IX: 907-8). The
romance thus ends, having led only to imprisonment, death and
Vaudracour's 'imbecile mind' (IX: 935). Wordsworth disregards the
generic requirements of romance, using the story to exemplify the
pernicious effects of tyranny, but he shows clearly enough the capac-
ity for violence offered by the genre: by linking the Tale directly with
the depradations of French tyranny, by utilising murder as a turning
point, by killing off the baby. On another level he does violence to the
notion of romance itself: love is defined by trauma, terror, murder,
imprisonment and separation. Vaudracour is revealed as an inade-
quate hero, unable to withstand the forces of, here, parental
oppression. 10 Finally, Wordsworth operates on an extra-textual level,
showing the congeniality with which the romance co-operates with
authorial desires: the story of Vaudracour and Julia hides
Wordsworth's personal history; it exemplifies the need to change in
France; it illustrates the effects of tyranny. The bodily harm suffered
by Julia, Vaudracour and the baby combine with the damage
Wordsworth does to plot, with the result that the romance implodes,
its meaning detached from plot yet contingent on that plot's disorder.
For Wordsworth, romantic violence represents political violence.
Wordsworth conjoins the romance and violence to make a political
point, but he embeds in his Tale his personal love story, itself
disjointed and fragmentary. In this way he participates in the romance
revival, and yet he is seldom discussed as a romancer; even Curran
mentions only The White Doe ofRylstone, calling it a 'lyrical romance,
whose central concern is not action, but the functioning of symbols'
(142). Walter Scott, by contrast, is frequently discussed as a writer of
romances, although his novels are the focus, along with his standing
as the 'creator' of the regional novel/historical novel/national novel.
Indeed, a recent article on his poetic romances emphasises Scott's
status as historian, his poetry serving as historical documents. 11 This
offers an interesting insight into Scott's method, but also implies that
Scott's romances need tightening up - that they need, as well as exem-
plify, the vigour of the masculine. The use of Gothic imagery and

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 Introduction 7

antiquarian detail is not gender-determined, however, as the

romances of Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon show.
Michael Gamer, the critic in question, mentions only in passing what
is particularly telling about Scott's style of romance: the peculiarly
vexed heroism of his heroes. Marmion especially threatens to undo the

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weave of romance altogether: 'Marmion threatens to subvert the
poem's' - and the genre's - 'standards of chivalric warfare and
courtship' (Gamer 546), while Curran notes that Marmion's lawless-
ness questions the romance ethos (138 passim). Certainly Marmion's
villainy cancels out his martial prowess; Scott seems uninterested in
composing a thorough hero, and his creative role-mixing injects a
scepticism aimed at an unthinking ratification of chivalric values:
Scott undercuts chivalry to demonstrate its liabilities. As much as he
relies on the popularity of romance, and uses its tropes to establish a
heroic national history for Scotland, he is uncomfortable with a total
investment in its import. To convey his dissatisfaction, he rewrites
chivalry by rehousing it. To balance Marmion's treachery and base-
ness and the general ineffectualness of his heroes, Scott offers
chivalrous women: Constance, Margaret, the Ladye, Ellen, all of
whom demonstrate the positive aspects of romantic chivalry:
constancy, loyalty, bravery, honesty, hardihood. Scott's worlds of
romance are informed by a sense of the past and a creative medieval-
ism that functions as the early nineteenth-century version of the
mid-eighteenth-century revival of the romance. The work of earlier
antiquarian researchers - Hurd, Percy, Reeve - is theatrically recast:
Scott's world of romance is both historically informed and ahistori-
cally aware of its own imminent disappearance. Hence, he can write
(of) the lay performed by the 'last' minstrel even though the minstrel
himself is only hazily aware of his belatedness. Similarly, the
romances he sings of contain the familiar elements, but infected with
a sense of cynicism and self-regard: Scott's knights and heroes are
strangely unable to conquer their own violent impulses, let alone slay
villains and rescue fair maidens. Instead, echoing the challenges to
gender thrown down by most of the poets this book discusses, Scott
invests his female characters with the strength, honour and purity
expected of the true Knight. It is a marker of his loss of confidence in
the romantic ethos that his heroines are not protected by their
honour, but are instead the victims of a blind chivalry that may follow
its rules to the strict letter, but has forgotten about the spirit.
Both Wordsworth and Scott write romances; both radically alter the
romance's meaning and both use violence to do so. They, and the

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8 Introduction

poets whose work is the focus of this book, explore the 'dark side of
romanticism ... the loneliness, dread, and ... violence of human
experience that stand counter to predominant romantic assumptions
about ideal beauty and human possibility'. 12 They do this at an histor-
ical epoch peculiarly inflected by war and political violence, and they

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do so through a genre that requires specific adaptations to suit. The
romance transmogrifies from a peripheral genre, embarrassing in its
shallowness, to a key to romantic-period cultural anxiety. As this book
shows, the style of writing romance remains fairly stable, with some
important plot deviations, but the style in which violence is portrayed
changes from the indirect, metaphorical method of the 1780s and
1790s to the direct representation of 'real' violence in the 1810-20s. It
is difficult to assign a reason for this change, but one may speculate:
as the intensity and duration of real-life violence - war - continued
unabated, violence itself may have become easier to represent - an
instance of art imitating life. What was unspeakable in the 1790s had
become routine a generation later. In this way, the presence of actual
violence implants a receptivity to violence in literature, at first coun-
tered by reluctance, fear and a preference for masquerade, later dulled
by the repetitive onslaught of actual images of violence and thus
requiring increasing explicitness. For both the poet and the reader, the
dose must be increased to achieve the same thrill. As Chapter 1
explains, for many theorists of the romance, it was its very propensity
to encourage vicarious emotions that constituted its strength, and its
threat. Once attach violence to the romance and its currency - as risk,
as sop, as mirror, as protest - goes up. As this book seeks to establish,
this is the romantic appeal of romance: it is flexible, open to sugges-
tion, desirous to please, malleable. And under the handling of
Romantic poets, it reveals its sociopathic nature.
Each chapter in this book focuses on one aspect of the romance and
explores its manipulations and metamorphoses by representative
poets. First, Chapter 1 sets the scene by reviewing the history of the
romance revival. Offering an analysis of tracts purporting to define
and place the 'new' romance in the late eighteenth century, this
chapter investigates the allure of chivalry and its association with
fantasy. David Duff, for instance, discusses the chivalric tone of
several pro- and anti-Revolutionary tracts of the 1790s; his romanti-
cised version of chivalry, however, does not take into account its dark
side: that what chivalry can hide is a devotion to and glorification of
war and killing. As much as chivalric values are the embodiment of
virtue and order, they also represent an attempt to impose order;

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 Introduction 9

repression and restriction shadow the purity that is associated with

knightly behaviour. The myth of order is undermined by an increas-
ing inability to maintain that order, and the rhetoric surrounding the
romance, the many attempts to define and contain it, mirror this
conflict. I contextualise this discussion by concentrating on tracts

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produced during the revolutionary years, including the American
Revolution (the repercussions of which are usually ignored). This
chapter sets up key sources and defines the terms and tropes that the
rest of the study will approach in detail.
Chapter 2 discusses the erotic and violent world of the Delia
Cruscan poets. These authors knowingly exploit the elements of the
romance: the Delia Cruscan circle's intimacy and veiled eroticism
exert a strong and abiding - even romantic - influence on its mainly
female readership. By casting their poetry as versions of sexual love-
letters to each other, poets such as Robert Merry (the circle's leader)
and his female 'correspondents' skirt issues of propriety and social
order; they establish a kind of poetical harem that defies decorum.
And yet, the language of their poetry remains curiously formulaic, as
if the power of sexuality can only be tapped if the flow is rendered
weak. Even, then, as the Delia Cruscan version of the romance creates
individualised contracts of poetic passion, it also defuses the strength
it invokes. Emotional violence is countered with poetical precision.
In Chapter 3, I contrast the personal romance constructed by
Coleridge in his 'conversation poems' with Keats's romances from his
1820 volume. I argue that each poet can be seen to be constructing
versions of the quest; where Coleridge makes himself - that is, his
poetic persona - into the questing hero, Keats utilises myth and liter-
ary history as his sources. And yet both poets seem unable to imagine
a successful resolution for their heroes. Coleridge's continual heroic
self-armouring concludes as continually in failure and dejection,
while Keats's heroes - Lycius, Lorenzo, the Knight-at-arms, even
Porphyro - meet violent ends or else disappear into the past. These
poems of failed quest-heroes do literary violence to the notion of the
heroic romantic subject, while their different approaches reflect a
changing attitude to the level of violence depictable.
Chapter 4 focuses on Mary Robinson and Felicia Hemans and their
versions of the interrupted romance. Again, the contrast exists
between Robinson's suggestive approach, wherein her violent disrup-
tion to romantic closure is expressed through dream-visions and
allusions, and Hemans's direct representations of dying men. Where
Robinson's romances fail because of the weakness of her characters,

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10 Introduction

Hemans's are often undone through their strengths: that is, masculine
endurance is put to the test of disease and torture until it finally gives
out. The outcome - the romance gone awry - dramatises an increasing
unease with the relationships offered by the romance.
The study concludes by examining how Letitia Landon and Byron

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transform the romance into the violent and sensational world of the
melodrama. Byron's melodramatic Eastern poems often recast the
heterosexual vision of star-crossed lovers offered by the romance as a
moment of homosocial masculine definition, while Landon's equally
melodramatic poems of blasted love reveal the emptiness of the
promise held out by the romance a generation earlier. Both authors
privilege death - suicide, murder - over any more peaceful resolution,
and neither can imagine a world wherein romantic relationships are
viable. For both, the growing solidification of gender roles and expec-
tations and the formation of absolutely separate spheres renders
male/female relationships impossible. Although Landon's strategy is
to cast the feminine sphere as destructive to masculinity and hence
love, while Byron's is to construct masculinity itself as destructive to
women, the work of both reveals the breakdown of the ideals of the
romance and in this, the triumph of a cultural insistence on concre-
tised sexual roles.
In 1930, when he first published The Romantic Agony, Mario Praz
thrust violence into the discourse of Romanticism and was rewarded
with twenty years of dismissive and patronising reactions. 13 Violence
in literature is difficult to discuss, in part because it is only ever
textual; it depends on the susceptibility of its readers for its effect, and
especially when the genre is Romantic poetry, it must contend with
decades of criticism divorcing subjectivity from corporeality.14 The
romance, however, actively encourages the disorder and strife that
accompany violent imagery and content; and Romantic romance
poetry is less queasy than its critics. The trajectory followed by the
romance supplies modern readers with important insights into a
cultural reliance on the unreal, a multivalent dependence mirrored in
the clash between readers and works, desire and expectation, romance
and reality, love and death. Despite critical willingness to underesti-
mate its vigour, in its changing and increasingly violent world the
romance figures and emblematises Romanticism itself.

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1
Reviving the Romance: What's
Love Got to Do with It?

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What wildly-beauteous form,
High on the Summit of yon bicrowned hill,
Lovely in horror, takes her dauntless stand?
Tho' speeds the thunder there its deep'ning way
Tho' round her head the lightnings play,
Undaunted she abides the storm;
She waves her magic wand,
The clouds retire, the storm is still;
Bright beams the sun unwonted light around,
And many a rising flower bedecks the enchanted ground.

Romance! I know thee now,

I know the terrors of thy brow;
I know thy awful mien, thy beaming eye;
And lo! whilst mists arise around
Yon car that cleaves the pregnant ground!
Two fiery dragons whirl her through the sky;
Her milder sister loves to rove
Amid Parnassus' laurell'd grove,
On Helicon's harmonious side,
To mark the gurgling streamlet glide;
Meantime, thro' wilder scenes and sterner skies,
From clime to clime the ardent genius flies.

Dim shadows circle round her secret seat,

Where wandering, who shall approach shall hear
The wild wolf rend the air;
Thro' the cloud-mantled sky

11

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12 The Romantic Paradox

Shall see the imps of darkness fly,

And hear the sad scream from the grim retreat;
Around her throne
Ten thousand dangers lurk, most fearful, most unknown. 1

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In 1795, when the young undergraduate Robert Southey published his
ode 'To Romance' under the pen-name 'Bion', the revival of the
romance was fully established; since the mid-1760s scholars had been
publishing defences and explications of a form that, nonetheless,
refused a completely fixed definition. 2 As Southey's enthusiastic verse
shows, Romance encompassed love and war, peace and violence: its
female figurehead seductively offers both complete submission and
exciting domination. Southey cannot decide if he wants his emblem
to embrace or reject the traits assigned her gender; to get around his
difficulty he provides her with a 'milder sister' who roves through
softer, more appropriately pastoral landscapes, but he cannot resist the
compelling nature of the 'ardent genius' who 'flies' 'thro' wilder scenes
and sterner skies'. True to her gender, Romance cannot be pinned
down; she refuses the softer, more genteel life her sister leads; she is
not 'romantic' but unruly. Her demeanour suggests not pliability, not
love, but mastery. As the poem shows, much of Romance's attraction
lies, for Southey at least, in her ability to control, through a kind of
stern sexiness, both the elements and her readers, here embodied by
Southey's poet persona: as both reader and writer of what he reads he
occupies a uniquely supervisory position, both in thrall to and in
control of a genre. But Romance herself asserts an authority that
compels the poet to versify her history, and in a chronology heavily
indebted to Hurd, Warton, Reeve, and the other theorisers of earlier
decades, he works his way from early medievalism to Rousseau, whom
he names 'the guide of my life', and then abruptly ends the poem.
Southey's panegyric usefully encapsulates the themes this chapter
will explore. It demonstrates the general availability of theories of the
romance to the educated reader (if immature poet); it makes plain the
association between women and the romance; it reveals the powerful
hold of war and violence on the conventions of the genre; it echoes
the turn to chivalry especially powerful in the 1790s but gaining
prominence from the 1760s on, as David Duff has established.3
Although the figure of Romance is powerful enough to stand as a
Britomart thoroughly able to take care of herself, she nonetheless
requires the poetic champion Southey to present her sympathetically,
a critically chivalrous impulse that, as I shall discuss, informs many of

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 Reviving the Romance 13

the scholarly tracts dedicated to this theme. And this is vital, for, as
Southey's Romance shows, as much as he wants to turn her towards
love, war keeps getting in the way, and given her gender, such an
emphasis is unseemly and even disruptive. Southey's allegory
performs for modern readers the masquerade that this book addresses:

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that the romance is concerned more with violence than with peace,
and that chivalry is a euphemism for repression. His poem makes
plain the violence embedded in both the 'old' (medieval) and the
'new' (post-Spenser) romances: even once 'love, with innocence,
assumes his reign', 4 the verse almost immediately turns to chieftains'
'deadly blows'. Clearly, Romance needs her poet to keep her in line,
and she relies on his skill to make her presentable. Underpinning,
then, the attractions of Romance is the trope that threatens to explode
them: this chapter will trace the modifications of critical idiom in
tracts devoted to the romance, starting slightly before the revolution-
ary period and culminating in the 1790s and that decade's
explorations of chivalry. By 'revolutionary period' I mean approxi-
mately 1770 onwards; as part of my argument unpicks the knots
created by the cultural affect of revolution, it is important to note that
the power of the French uprising was foreshadowed, and even
emblematised, by the American Revolution (1775-83). Of course, the
critical commonplace is that the American War of Independence (to
give it its name in British history) did not really impinge on the
culture of the time, that few thinkers concerned themselves with such
a distant conflict, and that it was rather more a relief than a regret
when the Colonies were Tost'. And yet, as subsequent chapters suggest
a complex and deep interrelationship between the threat posed by the
Revolution and war with France and the solace offered by the conven-
tional romance, so too an initial investigation of the revival of the
romance in the second half of the eighteenth century - and its critical
transformation from disgusting and immoral to pleasing (though still
immoral) - can be linked in profitable ways with the rumblings of the
American Revolution.5
David Duff makes the valuable point in Romance and Revolution that
'the revolutionisation of the language of romance that took place in
the political writing of the [French] Revolution debate, and ... the
existence in the English imagination of the "revolutionary romance"
of the Revolution itself characterises the 1790s. The thrust of his argu-
ment - that political writers championed their cause through the
canny deployment of language borrowed from the romance - reminds
readers of the pervasive influence of the genre, despite its public guise

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14 The Romantic Paradox

as insipid, corrupting and debased. This, indeed, is an instance of the

'ambivalence' of the romance; as Patricia Parker says, 'its charms were
indistinguishable from its snares' (163). For Duff's purposes, one
charm was the seemingly dependable nature of the romance world:
'The magical narratives of romance - with their ideal heroes, transform-

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ation scenes and earthly paradises, but also their terrifying
monsters, and their deceptions, temptations and errors - offered an
apt and accurate metaphorical language to write about the extraordi-
nary phenomenon that confronted them' (13). As this
characterisation shows, however, the romance world did not and
could not offer merely the escapist fantasy described by Northrop
Frye; even as its 'charms were its snares', so too its snares were very
present: although one mark of the hero/heroine may be his/her imper-
viousness to - or, in the case of the hero, his escape from - deception,
temptation and error, still such danger awaited - indeed, invited -
him/her. Duff implies but does not discuss that one reason the
romance metaphor was so attractive to political writers was because
the world it contained was one wherein the French Revolution and
cultural upheaval were not happening. In other words, it was safe,
ordered, recognisable and definable. But because, in Fredric Jameson's
words, 'romance ... is that event in which the world in the technical
sense of the transcendental horizon of my experience becomes
precisely visible as something like an innerworldly object in its own
right, taking on the shape of the world in the popular sense of nature,
landscape, and so forth' (142) - that is, romance both replaces and
reifies 'world' - its safety and security were compromised by its narra-
tive reliance on tropes of violence. Duff's 'revolutionisation of the
language of romance' is only possible because of what the romance
allows: both violence and the rejection of it, a restabilisation of a
world temporarily shaken.
Although theorists of the romance in the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s
do not make overt reference to the Revolution their culture was
witnessing - or refusing to watch - it is telling that a genre that
emphasised military ardour and chivalric exploits was being re-exam-
ined at the same time that the Redcoats were arming, then fighting,
then straggling home. The reverential tone adopted by Hurd, Percy
and others towards the heroics of romance replaces real-life attention
paid to their defeated army. Indeed, if one accepts Eric Auerbach's
class-based analysis of the service that romance was put to, then its
reviving popularity suggests that it acts as a stand-in for, as much as a
mirror of, the generals and colonels in America. Auerbach's

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 Reviving the Romance 15

contention that the romance 'offers a very rich and pungent picture
of the life of a single class', and that such a plot-line allows for the
continuation of class distinction as well as a reassuring frisson for
readers of being of the 'right sort', confers on those who write about
it a privilege both intellectual and social.6 Real-world soldiers are

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defeated and humiliated; in the world of the romance, such events, if
they happen, have a meaning, and they don't happen very often. To
understand the romance, then, means to make all right with the
world.7 Thus, if one chooses to discuss the romance, to deflect atten-
tion from military imprecision and class conflict to tales which
maintain the status quo, then in one sense the disruption is not
happening. The loss embodied by the lost war becomes the gain
figured by the thick volumes of Percy's Reliques and the multiple
attempts to pin down the exact nature of the romance.
Of course, a direct correlation - ignore the Revolution, concentrate
on the romance - is too simple a formulation, and yet the attention
paid to the unreal exploits of ages past, the turn to the comforting,
knowable, ordered set of rites that is chivalry, and the desire to estab-
lish the literary heritage of the nation in the workings of a genre
where right, truth and purity were rewarded betrays a desire to justify
and support the courtly values of the nation. 8 Even, then, as they
wrote about the romance, intellectuals were also recreating its world,
re-establishing its importance, and reinscribing its parameters -
repeatedly. For despite a general agreement about how to define the
romance and its world, writers still did so again and again, citing and
supporting each other without seeming to recognise that they were
rewriting each other as much as re-presenting the romance. And even
as volumes appeared defining the romance, differentiating it from the
novel, and declaring the superiority of one or the other, they also
protested the general loss of the romance and its values, as a genre and
as an ideal - Burke's famous pronouncement is only the most well-
known. 'Bishop Hurd, with others of his century, saw romance as a
receding form, a world of fine fabling being crowded out by the
advance of mind', says Parker (15). Such an elegiac attitude, however,
is belied by the constant reinvocations of the romance, whether posi-
tively or negatively. Further, the apparent need to distinguish between
the romance and the novel, and curious inability to do so (manifested
by repeated attempts to do so) well into the nineteenth century, show
that, far from being about to die out, the romance was continually
resuscitated by critics who seemed anxious they might lose it. Clearly,
the genre was viable and deeply significant. Why? And how?

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16 The Romantic Paradox

Critical chivalry

For many critics rediscovering the romance, its worth lay in the
chivalric world created by knights, ladies, castles, and courtly values.
The belatedness of John Batty's 1890 study The Spirit and Influence of

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Chivalry only emphasises this point; he is lyrical, even rhapsodic in his
proposal that chivalry is the basis for all virtuous human (that is,
male) action: 'Oh! what would become of the human race if the spirit
of self-sacrifice, which is one of the brightest gems in the crown of
chivalry, became extinct?' 9 Batty's examples of modern chivalry -
manning lifeboats, rescuing trapped miners, saving a drowning child
- rely on a gentlemanly sense of noblesse oblige and right; writing at
the end of a century that refocused attention on the medieval
romance as narrative, he is fulsome in his praise of its values.
Inhabiting his account of courtly behaviour, however, is a sanitised
form of violence: 'The highest development of the chivalric idea gives
a spiritual aspect to chivalry - in fact, makes it the exponent of
Christianity ... religion put in action' (84). This religious chivalry
translates into the Christian's fight for his faith:

By sacred and allegorical writers this world has been frequently

represented as a scene of spiritual warfare, the foes in the field
against which the Christian has to fight being those of the world,
the flesh, and the devil [L]ife is a constant struggle against evil
... in order to overcome it The weapons of this spiritual
warfare are taken from the 'armoury of knighthood', and are made
use of metaphorically to illustrate the doctrines and truths of
Christianity. Thus St. Paul ... says 'put on the whole armour of
God', 'taking the shield of faith', 'the helmet of salvation', 'the
sword of the Spirit', and so on. (84-5)

Transferring chivalry from the secular to the sacred world (and

intriguingly casting St Paul as a kind of apostolic de Scudery), Batty
still infuses it with violence, even if the fight is, as he eventually labels
it, metaphorical: Batty's romance ur-text is the Bible, wherein St Paul
functions as a page to his squire, the Christian, arming him for the
battle against evil. With the Bible transformed into a romance
containing lessons in chivalry, the origins of both are validated and
celebrated: if romance informs the Bible, Batty seems to argue, then
who but the devil can contest its worth? And if violence is put to the
service of good - religion - against evil - the devil - then it, too, is

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 Reviving the Romance 17

transformed, no longer an impulse for which to apologise, but for

which to give thanks. Batty's romantic religion achieves for the 1890s
what Duff's romantic revolution does for the 1790s: it displaces the
tenets of chivalry, here onto an external 'Christian soldier' whose
onward movement is assisted by his association with courtliness.

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Inheriting 150 years' worth of speculating about and defining such
terms, he turns them inward, disembodies them, renders them
'metaphorical'. For Batty, the dark ages to be combated would be the
previous centuries which did not recognise the fundamentally
Christian nature of chivalry.
Batty's fin-de-siecle reappropriation insists on the presence of a
Biblical chivalry, but the eighteenth-century revival was concerned
less with faith than with fable. Despite laments that the Age of Reason
killed the romance, Hurd's 1762 Letters signalled a resuscitation; as
Duff notes, 'once the prejudice against the "dark ages" began to fall
away, it is not surprising that the intrinsic appeal of the ideal of
chivalry, and the validity of many of the ideals which the chivalric
code expressed, began once more to be recognised' (30). Hurd's inves-
tigation of the romance and chivalry takes the form of didactic letters
to a 'dear friend' and is determinedly intellectualised, just as Batty's
will be determinedly religious: the appeal here is to the mind, and to
'curious speculation'. Even barbarous times have something to offer
rational thinkers, he posits. Hurd's understanding of the romance
mixes interpretation with speculation, but like Batty and Southey he
clearly locates chivalry's origins in violent war: what comes to be a
series of courtly rituals begins as mere self-defence in an age of gothic
disorder. 'Chivalry ... seems to have sprung immediately out of the
FEUDAL CONSTITUTION .... the feudal state was, in a good degree,
a state of war,' and chivalry itself a 'military institution'. 10 Hurd is
careful to explain that such violent origins did not mean the institu-
tion itself was irrational: 'Chivalry was no absurd or freakish
institution, but the natural and even sober effect of the feudal policy;
whose turbulent genius breathed nothing but war, and was fierce and
military even in its amusements' (85). Just as Batty will describe his
christianised chivalry as metaphorical, here Hurd designates his
version as 'sober' - not heady, not irrational, not uncontrolled. Because
'the barbarians' of the 'barbarous ages' had good reasons for their
conduct, and because method could be discerned and behaviour
labelled, Hurd's own study is justified, and although his unfolding of
chivalry reveals an institution almost wholly dependent on personal
and communal violation and bloodshed, his tone remains approving,

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18 The Romantic Paradox

even admiring, throughout. Hence knight-errantry develops from

bandit-raids and the self-interested protection of one's property,
which included one's woman: 'the interest, each had to protect his
own, would of course introduce the point of honour in attempting by
all means not only to retaliate on the enemy, but to rescue the captive

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sufferers out of the hands of their oppressors' (87). Courtesy is borne
out of fear: 'the castles of the Barons were ... the courts of these little
sovereigns, as well as their fortresses; and the resort of the vassals
thither, in honour of their chiefs, and for their own proper security,
would make that civility and politeness, which is seen in courts ... a
predominant part in the character of these assemblies' (88, emphasis
added). Most tellingly, chivalry's ornament, chaste courtly love and
its veneration of women, arises out of resentment at the rapine of
one's enemies: 'gallantry would take a refined turn ... from the
inflamed sense [princes] must needs have of the frequent outrages
committed, by their ... adversaries, on the honour of the Sex
Violations of chastity being the most atrocious crimes they had to
charge on their enemies, they would pride themselves in the glory of
being its protectors ...'(89). Hurd's conscientiously historicised
account teeters on the edge of revealing chivalry to be every bit as
barbaric and selfish as its critics charged.
That the ideals of chivalry and the courtly code can be so cogently
derived from bloody internal conflict and the need to contain it
suggest that the sturdy apolitical tone of Hurd's letters acts as a kind
of defence against the national rumblings and unrest in those distant
American colonies. Uncovering the logic of what was a system
designed to repress rebellion and contain violence - suggested by its
origins in violence - and declaring the rightness, even the beauty of
that system allowed this conservative clergyman to substitute a
fantasy past for a potentially troublesome present. And yet the para-
meters of that past - its basis in bloodshed and uncontrolled violence
- also necessitate a recovery of the past from itself. When Hurd comes
to discuss the romance and its development from an idealised
chivalry, he is able to dismiss chivalry's violence in favour of
romance's version of it: 'Gothic manners of chivalry, as springing out
of the feudal system, were as singular, as that system itself. So that,
when that political constitution vanished out of Europe, the manners,
that belonged to it, were no longer seen or understood — people
would be led of course to think and speak of them, as romantic, and
unnatural' (148). Having established the reality of romantic chivalry,
Hurd now consigns it to romantic fantasy, at least in the minds of

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 Reviving the Romance 19

those past 'people'; it has become, to use Batty's term, metaphorical.

In its newly romanticised - that is, unreal and unnatural - form,
gothic chivalry is divested of its rationality: and we have reached the
court of Elizabeth I, whose 'inclinations for the fancies of Chivalry is
well-known' (152, emphasis added). Now that chivalry has moved

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from a mode to a fancy, Hurd can only watch in dismay as the
'glowing splendour' of 'dawning' Reason puts 'the portentous spectres
of the imagination' 'to flight, and allow[s] them no quarter even
amongst the poets' (153). As he records the death of the chivalric ideal
(and places it some centuries earlier than does Burke), Hurd takes on
the very language of the form that he mourns: chivalry and the
romance undergo a transformation to spectres, and are then routed by
the Red Cross Knight of Reason, being denied sanctuary even by their
natural protectors. This is a kind of dark romance, gone awry, where
the good and noble appear tainted, and where even the poets reject
the offspring of the imagination. That Hurd himself has effected a pre-
transformation when he allows the violence of chivalry to be its own
justification only enhances the romantic nature of his conclusion. A
straight reading of Hurd's elegy would produce the conviction that he
now approves of the demise of that which he has striven to resurrect:
and yet it is clear that Hurd has inserted himself into the romance of
his own reconstruction. He is bard, translator, sorcerer, hero, and even
villain, for as much as he champions romance, he also kills it off.
Hurd's wavering between supporting and rejecting the romance
results in a text wherein he takes on the very chivalric values he
describes. His description of the powers of the 'Gothic enchanters'
who 'shook and alarmed all nature' (110) finds its source in Hurd's
own scholarship; his revival and re-enactment of chivalry and gothic
romance requires a reordering of the nature of his culture's attitude to
the romance. Supported by Percy, Warton and others, Hurd reorients
the romance as not the Cervantes-style mindless imagining but as a
historical, recognisable and valid literary form. Concerned to present
it to its fullest advantage, he compares the gothic romance favourably
with the Grecian: 'the boisterous passions ... are provoked and kept
alive from one end of the Iliad to the other, by every imaginable scene
of rage, revenge, and slaughter on the whole, tho' the spirit,
passions, rapin, and violence of the two sets of manners were equal,
yet there was a dignity, a magnificence, a variety in the feudal, which
the other wanted' (109). As a Knight preserves and protects the
honour of his Lady, so Hurd does with chivalric romance, with the
crowning touch that 'Gothic manners and machinery ... have, by

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20 The Romantic Paradox

their nature and genius, the advantage of the [Classical] in producing

the sublime' (117). The dawning age of reason may have banished the
romance, but, Hurd implies, this is more a limitation of the current
age than a strength; and the validity of the romance and its values are
attested to by the ease with which Hurd deploys its language. Even as

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Percy 'laboured on the texts [in his Reliques], to present them in as
palatable a form as possible', 11 and in this way performs his own
knightly feat, so too Hurd imbues his text with a chivalric apprecia-
tion of and respect for what may be called the chastity of chivalry and
the honour of romance. Poets may have forsaken the romance, he
indicates, but this Bishop hasn't, and while Hurd avoids the romantic
religiosity of Batty, he conveys instead a critical chivalry that champi-
ons a genre on its behalf. That is, as female knights were an example of
'the excesses of military fanaticism' (86), so too romance on its own
presents dangerous excesses and must be mediated through the schol-
arly mind. In Percy's words: 'a taste for the old Romances begins to
revive (not among the common Readers, where it would do hurt but)
amongst our Critics and Poets'. 12 The physical violence out of which
chivalry and the romance arose may safely be stowed in the past, but
clearly, the romance itself still poses a threat.
Percy's attitude reflects the common conclusion that reading
romances destabilised and shocked young minds, unready for its
excesses; it is those excesses that fascinate and disgust Hurd, and feed
his inability fully to champion the romance. However, Clara Reeve's
The Progress of Romance (1785) sees its female speaker declare to an
incredulous male listener that romances are actually 'epics in prose',
hence fully respectable, and having thrown down this challenge
begins her own critical recovery of a maligned form, in what may be
called 'The Romance of The Progress of Romance'. By 1785, it has
become necessary not merely to define 'romance' but to distinguish it
from 'novel', and Reeve deftly separates the two by commenting that
in a novel things happen that could happen, while in a romance
things happen that are unlikely ever really to happen. The text is in
two volumes, and the first deals mainly with the romance, the second
mainly with the novel. But Reeve is most concerned with continuing
the debate on the value and worth of the romance; even in Volume II
she contextualises the shortcomings of the novel by highlighting the
advantages of the romance. Reeve's study points out the quizzical,
almost fairy-tale nature of defences of the romance: as often as they
appear, it seems as if there must always be a fresh one, as if instead of
acting cumulatively to establish an impregnable defence, they merely

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 Reviving the Romance 21

effect each other: that is, they act to bring the next tract into being,
creating a world as insular and contained as the romance-world itself.
Certainly, Reeve's takes note of what has gone before - Hurd, Percy,
Susannah Dobson 13 all get their mention and are extensively quoted,
in extracts the romance's advocate, Euphrasia, uses to her advantage.

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But the implication is that it just hasn't been done well enough yet -
the romance remains vulnerable, continues to require a champion, as
if the genre itself is like an imprisoned, enchanted damsel: many
champions, seemingly unconquerable, will come forward, and all will
fail. Reeve plots this trope into her study, for at the outset it is plain
that Euphrasia - Reeve's voice in the text - sees herself as Romance's
new protector, and her listeners - sceptical Hortensius, supportive
Sophronia - as alternately her assistants and her foes. That Reeve
creates a fictive non-fiction demonstrates her romantic commitment
to her task: what better way of illustrating the respectable viability of
the romance than through the writing of a version of it? Reeve
employs her characters in the romance's service, showing its flexibil-
ity (her three characters play all the roles), its viability (they sustain
their interest for more than 230 pages over two volumes), and its
morality. Unlike Hurd, Reeve shows no ambivalence; the perfect parti-
san, she admits romance's faults but soon converts them into
strengths. And she argues from a uniquely informed position she
makes plain is contingent on her gender: she knows romances because,
as a woman, she has read them. Further, as a rational being (and
Reeve/Euphrasia's claim to rationality is all the more striking for her
unapologetic assumption of it), she understands romance. The Progress
of Romance, then, is also Euphrasia's - and her companions' - progress
through Romance.
Euphrasia refuses the usual female roles offered by the romance,
those of victim or villain, allowing Reeve immediately to begin rewrit-
ing her romantic tract. She is neither (to borrow Cixous's terms)
sorceress nor hysteric, although she does make use of kinds of talis-
mans, as any proper knight must do. To borrow yet more terminology,
where Frye argues that in the romance, 'virginity is female honor, the
symbol of the heroine's ... independence', 14 Euphrasia follows
instead a code of (intellectual) experience: her independence of mind
is gained through independent thought, and The Progress of Romance
makes clear that this affords Euphrasia bodily protection. Viewed by
her listeners as a friend, rather than as the sexualised body that is
'woman', Euphrasia's knightly demeanour relies on a courtly chastity
which is self- rather then other-protected: she is her own Knight as

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22 The Romantic Paradox

well as Romance's. And the tournament begins immediately - almost

the first words in the text are Hortensius'.

What, Madam, do you think you can give a challenge, and go off
with impunity? - I am come hither to demand an explanation of

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your behaviour ... and I have brought [Sophronia] with me to be a
witness to our dispute - of the defeat of one of us, - or perhaps of
our compromise, and reconciliation.

Sophronia. Or that Euphrasia shall make a convert to her own

opinion. 15

Hortensius begins by invoking the language of gentlemen: he wants to

settle their 'dispute' through a kind of verbal duel. Sophronia's contri-
bution, however, opens the possibility that the usual gender hierarchy
will not be observed in this text, furthered by Euphrasia's subsequent
metaphorical arming. As the first paragraphs progress, it emerges that
Euphrasia has compared romances to epic poetry, which Hortensius
cannot abide, insisting on an inherent literary inequality; when
Sophronia finds she is unable to 'ward off his attack' she 'engage [s] her
honour' that Euphrasia can 'give Hortensius full satisfaction' (3).
Reeve has plunged us deep in the language of chivalry, eighteenth-
century style, but before long a more familiarly romantic version takes
its place.
Throughout The Progress of Romance Reeve maintains her romance-
derived plotting, ensuring that Euphrasia's Knight has both an
adversary (in the shapes of Hortensius and received wisdom) and her
necessary pages (again Hortensius and the patient Sophronia).
Enlisting them, she says T shall depend upon your assistance, and since
you have opened my mouth upon the subject, you are bound in
honour to correct my redundancies, and to supply my deficiencies' (9).
Juggling his roles as page and villain, Hortensius asks 'What to furnish
you with weapons for my defeat?' Although the answer can only be
'yes', Euphrasia unravels Hortensius' confused identities by retorting
'Not so, but to assist me in the course of my progress through the land
of Romance' (9). Euphrasia, as determined in her defence of romance
as Hortensius is in his denigration, disables his villain-status and places
him in her service. 'Armed with [her] papers and extracts - Artillery
and fire-arms against the small sword, the tongue' (notes Hortensius
[5]), she conducts her listeners and readers through romance's claims
to legitimacy: by describing the plots of Virgil and Homer, she links the

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 Reviving the Romance 23

romance and epic worlds to romance's benefit; she argues for the inspi-
rational effect of the romance on the court of Elizabeth I;16 she
characterises the romance as itself a guardian and guide when she
declares its narrative strategy to be 'pointing] out the difference
between Virtue and Vice, to shew one rewarded and the other

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punished' (94). Euphrasia is less concerned to unpack the violent
nature of romance than to emphasise its soothing effect on readers;
and yet, even Euphrasia is anxious about the 'bad' - that is, badly
formed - romances: they are 'apt to give a romantic turn to the reader's
mind', they can contain 'absurdities' (79, 87 passim). Interestingly, it
takes Euphrasia three-quarters of her narrative to admit any defects to
the romance world, and it seems, further, as if this occurs not simply
because they must be mentioned but because Euphrasia is growing
tired. She increasingly exhibits an embattled attitude, and grows phys-
ically weaker as her defence falters; as if she and the romance are
symbiotically linked, and under a spell, her weakness and that of the
romance invade Reeve's text simultaneously. Indeed, towards the end
a concerned Sophronia needs to coax Euphrasia outdoors and give her
her arm once there. 17 Euphrasia, like her romance counterparts, finds
herself at risk from the very thing she would protect; in her verbal
jousting with Hortensius her energy is sapped.
As if affected against his will by the force of Euphrasia's arguments,
however, Hortensius tries more than once to reposition her as a more
familiar female romance character, the Enchantress. Having seen her
extracts as weapons, and in this way played along with her self-char-
acterisation as Knight, Hortensius changes his mind and begins to
refer to those extracts as charms: 'She comes upon us with her extracts
again, and she uses them so as to make them irresistible' (92).
Embedded in Hortensius' complaint is fear: Euphrasia's skilful use of
men's weapons - i.e. words, intellectual studies - is convincing him,
and he must counter this by attempting to transform her and her
accoutrements into something his limited knowledge of the romance
understands. If she is an enchantress, then she is unnatural, and his
weakness in succumbing to her is allowable, even understandable -
indeed, Hortensius has become a victim at the hands of Romance, and
his attitude that romances are vulgar and inferior is, perversely, borne
out: not because he sees himself as in thrall, as if in a romance, but
because Euphrasia has descended to such tactics. Again in reference to
Euphrasia's extensive evidence, Hortensius sneers that 'From whence,
and to what purpose have you conjured up such a list of uncouth
names - to frighten us' (30); feeling the force of her argument,

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24 The Romantic Paradox

Hortensius attempts to remove it from Reason to Fancy - words like

'conjure' and 'frighten' belong to the despised world of romance.
Because Euphrasia does not play along, Hortensius keeps trying:
"Whenever I think to catch you tripping, you glide away from me, and
in your place I find another person, whom I am to contend with' (61).

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Euphrasia's shapeshifting - her use of extracts - means for Hortensius
she is never really present; she 'has contrived so as to transfer [his]
attack from [her] self to [men of first-rate Genius, learning, and judg-
ment] whom [he] dare[s] not contradict' (90). In Hortensius'
complicated repositioning of the object of the chivalric impulse - not
women but learned men - he also gives further credence to
Euphrasia's argument and to the impervious nature of her weapons.
Part of Reeve's skill in The Progress of Romance is that, throughout the
argument, she both allows Euphrasia scholarly access to her intellec-
tual peers and allows Hortensius to expose his own bias when he
complains about this. Sophronia, the mostly silent moderator, always
judges in favour of Euphrasia.
And, despite her witchery, Euphrasia mounts an increasingly
impressive campaign. Braving Hortensius' discomfort, she deploys her
extracts to advantage. But there is one aspect of the romance that
Euphrasia cannot support wholeheartedly, and it is signalled by her
genderbending assumption of the Knight's role: she steadily under-
mines the romance's unthinking veneration of women, the very
aspect that Hurd and others especially approve. Recognising that it
limits rather than strengthens her Knightly valour, she refuses
Hortensius' attempts at gallantry:

Hortensius. I shall pay [Romance] due respect for your sake.

Euphrasia. Not so, Hortensius, I will not accept such respect for
them. - You shall pay it for the sake of those illustrious men, who
imbibed their enthusiasm, and carried it into practice. (52)18

Insisting on reasoned argument rather than gallantry, Euphrasia inci-

dentally presents a picture of romance-affected men, just as she will
hint at when describing the Elizabethan court. Male readers, then, are
as susceptible as female readers to the attractions of the romance; they
too imbibe the precepts of romance, and hence its 'right' aspects. At
the heart of Euphrasia's rationale is the notion of an egalitarian read-
ership likely to benefit from reading, and in that way exploring, the
purified land of the romance. Reeve relocates violence to the world

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 Reviving the Romance 25

outside the romance; she notes that the disorder and chaos of the real
world is encouraged by a style of writing that mimics that world (this
is her main criticism of the novel) and values the romance for the
positive impulses it inculcates, and for the order it keeps within its
highly structured world. As Euphrasia remarks, 'mankind are apt to

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run into extremes. We ridicule the enthusiasm of honour and glory,
and run headlong into the gulph of folly and dissipation - we throw
aside forms and ceremonies and sink into carelessness and negligence;
- we despise decorum and preciseness, and plunge into licentiousness'
(104). There is something breathless and threatened in Reeve's use of
multiple dashes, and her longing for forms, ceremonies, decorum and
precision (all found in the chivalric romance), and her fear of
extremes, folly and licentiousness reflects a desire to calm a disordered
world. In 1785, a balance-point between two revolutions, Reeve's text
looks to the romance for the order it offers, the formulaic plots it
delivers, the heroics it encourages. In the romance, 'heroes were
patterns of courage, truth, generosity, humanity, and the most exalted
of virtues, - its heroines were distinguished for modesty, delicacy, and
the utmost dignity of manners' (86-7). 19
A successful defence of romance means a successful defence of such
virtues. Far from wanting to escape into this world, Euphrasia wants to
import the romance into reality, to see it receive its fair due, to watch
its influence reorder, even cleanse, a culture threatened by violent
forces. As she progresses through the land of Romance, and as she and
her partners speak the language of Romance, they demonstrate the
viability of such conduct. As the questing Knight, Euphrasia seeks to
disentangle the good from the bad, to put a genre in order, and to
strengthen it against uninformed attacks like Hortensius' - who, as he
admits, hasn't read very many romances. Her victory comes when she
persuades Hortensius that a schoolboy's Classics contain more
harmful material than any Romance:

Hortensius. Your sex are most concerned in my remonstrance, for

they read more of these books than ours, and consequently are
most hurt by them.

Euphrasia. You well then become a Knight errant, to combat with

the windmills, which your imagination represents as Giants; while
in the mean time you leave a side unguarded.

Hortensius. And you have found it out. - Pray tell me without

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26 The Romantic Paradox

metaphors, your meaning in plain English.

Euphrasia. It seems to me that you are unreasonably severe upon

these books, which you suppose to be appropriated to our sex,
(which however is not the case): - not considering how many

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books of worse tendency, are put into that hands of the youth of
[y]our own, without scruple. (80-1)

When it becomes clear that Euphrasia refers to the violence and

'depravity' contained in the Greek Classics and their unmediated use
by schoolboys, Hortensius can only gasp T am astonished - admon-
ished - and convinced!' (82). He is vanquished. Euphrasia can ridicule
Hortensius with romance terminology because she is sure of victory,
and she sees that his argument is based on its own form of thought-
less absurdities - he is, here, a false Knight, spreading false doctrine.
Reeve's Britomart thus rescues Romance, and The Progress of Romance
ends with a general benediction: '[I] thank you for your assistance,
and the patience with which you have attended me in my progress'
(100). Reeve reveals far fewer reservations than does Hurd about the
value of romance, but she exposes a need: as much as chivalry origi-
nates in violence, she implies, it seems now to be what will help to
contain it.
The 1790s will make extensive use of chivalric imagery; it will have
a great need for its tropes. Much of what it understood about the
romance it inherited from Hurd, Reeve, et al. The actual details of
troubadours and chivalry, however, were supplied by Susannah
Dobson in two thick volumes, The Literary History of the Troubadours
(1779) and Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry (1784), both translated from
the French of M. de Saint-Pelaie (or Palaye), but extensively annotated
by Dobson. The two volumes demonstrate the more conflicted, fluid
approach to the romance that will characterise the 1790s; Dobson's
indecision regarding the overall benefit of chivalry to society finds its
analogue in, in Duff's words, the 'fundamentally unstable' 'language of
romance and chivalry' (133; Duff's emphasis). Even as Reeve's
progress through the land of Romance is marked by her certainty of
its beauties, Dobson's contemporaneous volumes mapping that same
land betray a greater unease with its parameters - and its influence.
Writing in 1760, Elizabeth Montagu notes that 'Histories of chivalry,
instead of enervating, tend to invigorate the mind, and endeavour to
raise human nature above the condition which is naturally prescribed
to it'. 20 And yet for Dobson (and indeed, for readers and writers in the

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 Reviving the Romance 27

1790s, as the last section of this chapter will discuss), this virtue also
acts as a threat: the invigorated, enhanced mind, risen above nature,
is by strict definition unnatural. Even as one celebrates the liveliness
of such a mind, one also fears its quickness. Chivalric ideals may
purify and ennoble, but they also de-naturalise: the world thus created

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is unrecognisable. 21 Akin to Beattie's assertion in 1783 that the publi-
cation of Don Quixote had the Prince-Charming affect of awakening its
readers from the sleep of unthinking torpor ('Mankind awoke as from
a dream. They laughed at themselves for having been so long imposed
on by absurdity; and wondered they had not made the discovery
sooner' 22 ), Dobson's texts at first believe in, then debunk, then
rethink, the viability and advisability of chivalry.
Dobson resembles the other writers I have discussed in that she
assumes the champion's knightly role, although here her 'Lady' is not
Romance itself but M. de Saint-Pelaie. In The Literary History of the
Troubadours, Dobson situates de Saint-Pelaie as ever more strictly
feminised: she praises and admires 'the immense labours' that have
given birth to the original text, and she names 'the Troubadours' as
'the fathers of modern literature'. 23 De Saint-Pelaie's labours and his
success in producing in coherent form the works of the fathers trans-
form him into the works' figurative mother, while Dobson's role in
preparing those texts for English readers place her most logically as
the midwife. But having anchored de Saint-Pelaie's chivalric history
in nature, even biology, allows Dobson to arm herself as his protec-
tor: the familial metaphor makes for the familiar - homely - character
of the texts, and encourages Dobson's readers to see de Saint-Pelaie as
deserving of attention, both Dobson's as his translator and the
public's as his readers. When Dobson tells us that de Saint-Pelaie's
work involved 'collecting] near four thousand compositions, and the
original lives of several of the poets'; gathering together scattered
fragments; and, most impressively, translating the fragments despite
not knowing old Provencal 'by great pains, in comparing different
words, and different passages' and showing sensitivity to idiom; then,
we sense, she takes for granted our agreement of his worth as a
scholar (History, vi-vii). 'Yet did he encounter and overcome all the
dignities, inspired with the honourable motive peculiar to men of
letters, the desire of acquiring and communicating knowledge'
(History, vii): the spirit of chivalry underpins Dobson's text, as she
invites us to see de Saint-Pelaie as a knight striving in aid of the
Troubadours, even as she strives in aid of him. This layering of chival-
ric imagery underscores Dobson's trust in its transparency and its

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28 The Romantic Paradox

value: knights champion knights who champion bards whose lays

admire the feats of knights. The 'rustic simplicity, joined with lively,
and sometimes sublime images' (History, x) that distinguish the works
she has translated point to the unique suitability of the lays to the
Age of Sensibility that cohabits with the Age of Reason: Dobson's

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prose appeals to the feeling mind, the combination of heart and
head, and suggests anew the appropriate nature of such texts and
such habits as romances and chivalry.
Dobson's tone consistently allies chivalry with nobility, even as she,
in her turn, acknowledges the violent origins of the code: 'chivalry
introduced a career of heroism, in which some of the social virtues
gave an eclat to the exploits of military life' (History, xiii). That is,
Dobson wants to link chivalry and nobility, but in a striking passage all
her best efforts seem only to reveal the questionable, if not distasteful,
aspects of the system she champions. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

There [in romances] we behold a passionate and outrageous valour,

which breathed after combats as its dearest pleasures, and which
drew the first laws of nature from the barbarous decisions of the
sword [T]he prodigality of the Nobles, set up as the essential
virtue of their nobility; as little delicate in acquiring the means, as
in the manner of their dissipation; and not blushing to accumulate
by rapine, what was to be exhibited by ruinous ostentation. There
we behold that spirit of independence which fosters the disorders
of anarchy; sometimes indeed with a view to interest, crouching
under the pliant and humble demeanour of a courtier, but always
ready to stand forth with audacity of the first favourable conjunc-
ture. There we behold a boorish and masculine familiarity, which
talks without reserves of persons and things; which censures with
equal rudeness the Prince and the subject, and establishes a
tyranny often greater than that which it opposes. 24 There we
behold a blind superstition, feeding itself with follies and absurdi-
ties; sacrificing to its chimeras, reason, humanity, and the Divinity
itself; debasing the Supreme Being by a mistaken homage, and
furnishing arms to that irreligion to which it gives birth. There we
behold the system of chivalry fully delineated. War, love, and reli-
gion formed the basis of this singular institution ... (History,
xvi-xvii)

The heaping-up of negative imagery, culminating in 'boorish and

masculine familiarity', suggests that, after all, Dobson is not so

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 Reviving the Romance 29

comfortable with either chivalry's ideals or its prime players; her femi-
nising of de Saint-Pelaie in her Introduction's earlier pages takes on a
greater resonance when it becomes clear that 'boorish' and 'masculine'
can be linked so evocatively. Her confusion foreshadows the ambigu-
ity of the 1790s, and yet it seems clear that Dobson herself does not

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recognise her indecision; in her concluding remarks she regards her
source material as 'useful examples to succeeding times' (History, 489)
of heroic behaviour, even as she fears that some readers might 'censure
them as dangerous', indeed, even as she expresses doubt about her
'ability to collect and weed them properly ... without injuring my own
principles or their originality' (History, 489, emphasis added). The
danger experienced by the translator is hastily displaced onto the
integrity of the texts. Dobson uneasily reins in her anxieties about the
threats posed by the texts and substitutes them with the conventional
appeal to what may be called, in light of her subject, the chivalry of her
readers, when she begs their indulgence for the inevitable weaknesses
her gender will impart to the translation. 25 In the end, chivalry is a
condition of, as well as the basis for, her translation.
When she publishes her translation of de Saint-Pelaie's (now de
Saint-Palaye) Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry five years later, Dobson
maintains a stronger grip on her text, and her own relation to her
source material. She erects the barrier of education, stressing the moral
and instructional nature of her text, and eliminating both the enthu-
siastic support for and attending anxiety about the elements of
chivalry. Under this new rubric, a sensible study of chivalric romance
helps to 'rescue the mind from ignorance and superstition' even if
such works now appear 'a childish object to attend to'. 2 6 Dobson's
earlier excitement over the allure of chivalry has transmuted into a
kind of maternal regard for the 'prattle' that 'prognostic[ates] ...
future perfection' (Memoirs, viii-ix). By reorienting the practice of
chivalry and its attendant storylines from the world of heroes to that
of children - by emphasising the immaturity and simplicity of the
romance - Dobson deflates the threat that nearly undid her in History.
Chivalry is now safe: 'pursued in their just measure [i.e. as childish],
such studies are not only innocent, but might prove useful relax-
ations' and a suitable, healthier alternative to late nights,
card-playing, and dances (Memoirs, xii, Dobson's emphasis). Dobson
stresses the educational value of the romances, the virtues they inspire
in young readers, and in doing so transfers the birth image the first
translation associated with de Saint-Pelaie to herself: T shall feel
amply rewarded for my labour' if the 'youth of both sexes' benefit

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30 The Romantic Paradox

(Memoirs, 373). And yet, it emerges, Dobson hopes for more than this,
and, further, attaches to romance the first trappings of a need that, as
the last section of this chapter takes up, becomes a focus in the 1790s:
she concludes her text by arguing for the advantages of a new order
of chivalry, one that will keep civilisation itself in order. The neglect

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of chivalric values has brought France to the edge of ruin, 27 'and it is
an awful consideration, that however dissimilar in some respects, yet
in this point, with all the superior knowledge we boast in this
enlightened period and country, the declining age of Chivalry bears
a strong resemblance to the present time' (Memoirs, 373). Although
muted, this is apocalyptic talk; Dobson's earlier casting of chivalry as
a childish, yet charming and instructive, code gives way to a conclud-
ing emphasis on its capacity to prevent social disorder and decay. Her
desire for a new age of chivalry prefigures the later sanctifying of King
Arthur as national emblem, once and future king, whose second
coming will herald a new age. Dobson ends on a valedictory, rhap-
sodic, and unsettling note:

Happy will it be, indeed, if that affectionate compact of youth and

age, that discretion and modesty, and that noble hospitality of
character and refinement of manners, shall revive in this nation,
which, in the first years of Chivalry, were the foundations of its
glory (and for which, in the good old times, the English were no
less renowned); and shall join with the increase of knowledge to
check the progress of dissipation, and restore those principles of
morality, order, and respect, which can alone insure solid virtue,
real elegance, and public peace. (Memoirs, 373-4)

Her percipient plotting of social chaos, to be held back only by the

judicious reintroduction of chivalric values, indicates the national
direction chivalry will take in the 1790s, and its loaded nature as a
governing metaphor. Chivalry is both a balm and a threat; the
romance both orders and disorders a familiar way of life. On the one
hand features 'the importance of raising the standard [of romances] as
high as possible; of exhibiting characters possessed of the most bril-
liant virtue, and purified as much as possible from every stain of
imperfection'; on the other, 'war, religion, and love, were the pillars
of this famous institution [chivalry]', 28 all of which were firmly
attached to a flawed world.

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 Reviving the Romance 31

The aesthetics of vicarious fear

Mary Robinson, in her 1796 novel Hubert de Sevrac, a Romance of the

Eighteenth Century, makes plain the romance that was to be derived
from the Revolution:

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The Ancient chateau of Montnoir, situated on the confines of
Lombardy, was the melancholy asylum of Hubert de Sevrac and his
unfortunate family. Born to an elevated rank in society, and
educated amidst the splendours of a court, he shrunk from the
approach of poverty, because it was accompanied by the menace of
disgrace, and embraced the moment which presented an opportu-
nity for flight, under the dreadful apprehension, that the next
might conduct him to a scaffold.29

She begins her story in the summer of 1792, securely linking her
romance, the Reign of Terror, and an exploration of an enervated, yet
pitiable, aristocracy. As much as de Sevrac is admirable, he is also
pathetic, allowing his 'exquisitely feeling heart, and ... dignified
sense of honour' (6) to drag him and his family into poverty and
misery. The danger from which de Sevrac flees is countered by his own
inability to take care of himself; the aristocratic abstraction from the
world that characterises him threatens his life every bit as much as the
guillotine. Robinson's romance is clearly republican, and sympathetic
to the aims of the Revolution; she reflects the thinking person's disil-
lusion when she balances her description of de Sevrac's plight with
her support for 'the cause of universal liberty' (7) even in its 'momen-
tous crisis': 'in the glorious effort for the emancipation of millions,
justice and humanity were for a short time unheard, or unregarded'
(7). Embedded in her romance, then, is an engagement with the
violence of the Terror as well as a veiled criticism of its aristocratic
victims: de Sevrac is not applauded for his sensibility, which causes his
family continuing trouble. Robinson thus dramatises the real experi-
ence of many for the entertainment of her readers, demonstrating the
viability of a Revolutionary romance and the attraction of vicarious
Terror. She also reveals the association between the romance of
chivalry, class and violence that will be the focus of this final section.
Chivalry's origin in war proves the starting-point for nearly every
writer who takes up this topic, as this chapter has discussed. The
ground prepared so carefully by Reeve, Dobson, Hurd, and the rest
proves fertile enough in the 1790s. What is also required, however, is

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32 The Romantic Paradox

an insistence on the unreality of romance as its main virtue: Montagu's

'Dialogue' (1760) is being facetious, but reflecting a real concern, when
she has her Bookseller maintain that 'when a gentleman has spent his
time in reading adventures that never occurred, exploits that never
were atchieved [sic], and events that not only never did, but never can

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happen, it is impossible that in life or discourse he should ever apply
them' (Montagu, Novel and Romance, 224). Montagu's Bookseller
unwittingly points out the value of romance-reading to the nervous
1790s: their very unreality keeps reality at bay; their inbred fantastic-
ness alleviates the temptations to take chivalry seriously, that is, to
emulate the French and champion liberty. Theorising about what the
romance was and from what impulses it originated was, then, accom-
panied, if not overtaken, by investigations of what the romance
offered, what it threatened, and, finally, what it had become.
Auerbach was not the first to discern a class-based morality in the
romance. Chivalry's origin in war-games has as its necessary corollary
an insistence on the impermeability of class boundaries: knights were
noble, and part of the pathos as well as the humour of Don Quixote
comes from his inability to recognise that he lacks a basic requirement
for knighthood of the errant sort. The chivalric ideal is also an aristo-
cratic ideal; 30 upholding the desirability of chivalric values means
supporting the notion of class-based behaviour, even as it may entail
certain responsibilities on that class. When, therefore, Burke bemoans
the death of chivalry,31 he is also mourning the passing of a class:
knights who protect ladies and queens, ladies who deserve protection.
Even as, in Duff's words, 'while recording the death of chivalry Burke
gives us a singularly vivid picture of it' (20), he also appeals to linger-
ing notions of who exactly was fitted to be a knight. The conservatism
of Burke is here manifested in his uncomplicated association between
aristocratic and chivalric values, but more than this Burke hints at the
lack of such values among those who would guillotine a queen - that
is, the labouring rabble who also stormed the Bastille and declared
Revolution. Burke in no way echoes Robinson's pro-Revolutionary
sympathies; he declares that the absence of chivalry fans the flames of
Revolution, that the absence of knights allows the free 'reign' given to
French violence. From Burke's point of view, what is needed is exactly
the restoration of courtly values, and a court in which to practise
them. Burke's rubric transfers the violence that underpins chivalry to
a world singularly in need of chivalry; for him, Marie Antoinette is a
symbol of a lost system, and her experience of violence reifies the
troubling, even deadly lack of an ideology to hold it at bay. For Burke,

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 Reviving the Romance 33

chivalry works to hold back violence, but he can only uphold this
definition by ignoring chivalry's own appeals to violence. By perform-
ing his own textually chivalric move, Burke allies himself with a
chivalric aristocracy and against the violently unromantic mob, even
as he chastises the group to which he aspires.

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Burke's positive presentation of chivalry stresses that what it offers
a chaotic society is order and protection, the virtues of a known code
against the uncertainties of an egalitarian arrangement. The 'regular
and splendid system' of chivalry 'may probably be ascribed to the
great number of nobility, who, in every part of Europe, were devoted
to the profession of arms' (Murray 68): in other words, a knightly
disinterestedness, an abstract approach that ensured purity of
purpose, and was only available to noble 'professors' of the 'art'. 32
Chivalry is as much a governing code as any constitution, 33 a fact that
makes the romance into a version of political primer. As early as 1725
Eliza Haywood notes that romances are designed for 'Instruction' as
well as 'Amusement, 'most of them containing Morals, which if well
observed would be of no small Service to those that read 'em'. 34 In
many ways, the moral of the conventional romance is the preserva-
tion and strengthening of the status quo, a task facilitated by the
attractiveness and the viability of the romance metaphor. Indeed, as
Duff shows, anti-Revolution rhetoric was as much indebted to the
language of chivalry as pro-Revolution talk. If the Bishop of
Auranches, Pierre Daniel Huet, can say in 1715 that 'Nothing
conduces so much to the Forming and Advancing [of Wit] to the
Approbation of the World, as the Reading of Romances', 35 then a
general invocation of and reliance on chivalric romances in the 1790s
appears as the logical outgrowth of their earlier social usefulness.
Romance offered, even demanded, the continuation of a lifestyle
where strength and goodness were rewarded, gender distinctions
(mostly) upheld, men protected women, social classes were strictly
observed and believed in. What current events offered was severe and
threatening class instability, at home and abroad; the breaking down
of old certainties, values and reward systems; anarchic worlds where
the Rights of Man, Men and Woman refused to acknowledge the Right
of tradition. The common tropes of the Romance, the recognisable
storylines, above all the stability it offered proved, for Burke and those
like him, the antidote to real-life violence and trauma. That such a
stance involved the re(w)riting of the genre was less troubling than its
alternative; 36 chivalry could be described as holding back violence
only by ignoring its own appeal to it. Those whose version of chivalry

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34 The Romantic Paradox

was a tool to calm social disorder subscribe to Blair's description:

romances 'furnish one of the best channels for conveying instruction,
for painting human life and manners, for showing the errors into
which we are betrayed by our passions, for rendering virtue amiable
and vice odious'. 37 Romance and chivalry instructed their readers in

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virtue of a particularly non-threatening sort.
And yet, for every Burkean lamentation there is another voice raised
against the romance, and it is in this general disagreement that the
two-pronged nature of a reliance on chivalry becomes plain. Chivalry
protects, but the romance can reject, social order; even Reeve
acknowledged that the wrong kind of romance in the wrong hands
was disastrous. Indiscriminate romance-reading led to mental dis-
order, a violence in the brain that, as Don Quixote, the Female
Quixote, Austen's Catherine Morland, and others attest, unfits readers
for the world. The danger of modern - 1790s - society is matched by
the danger of retreating from it into the romance, and this forms the
core of the romantic paradox: nothing maintains social order like the
chivalric romance, and nothing threatens it more. 38 Murray makes it
plain: 'Shall the reader be transported entirely into a new world, from
which everything coarse and turbulent is excluded The natural
effect [of this] will be, to lead a man to look for perfection in all those
whom he meets — [This] is extremely apt to terminate in discontent
and misanthropy' (Murray 29). The newly emphasised escapist quality
of the romance, then, is both its greatest asset and greatest danger. In
lifting the mind above the troubles of the world, it unfits the mind for
its return journey; the result is a naivete transformed into a kind of
idiocy. This brand of reader is too absorbed in the romance to notice
current events, and so the schadenfreude conducive to counting one's
blessings and keeping the boat steady is disabled. Barbauld notes this
aspect of romance-reading in 1773, twelve years before Reeve's study;
she too utilises its language, describing romance-reading as a kind of
enchantment: the 'gloom', 'languor', 'toil' and 'disappointments' of
ordinary life 'induce men to step aside from the rugged road of life,
and wander in the fairy land of fiction; where every bank is sprinkled
with flowers, and every gale loaded with perfume; where every event
introduces a hero, and every cottage is inhabited by a Grace'. 39
Indeed, as George Canning elaborates (although his point of view
clearly differs from Barbauld's), 'the fiction of romance is restricted by
no fetters of reason, or of truth; but gives a loose to lawless imagina-
tion, and transgresses at will the bounds of time and space, of nature
and possibility'. 40 The danger of romance is that it is unreal, and its

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 Reviving the Romance 35

fictionality, whether fairly benevolent as in Barbauld or subversive as

in Canning, battles against its reassuring effect. 'Romance', says
Parker, 'is simultaneously a refuge from the waking world and a
dangerous evasion [of it]' (160).
In the 1790s the romance is used by both sides: it both preserves and

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threatens social order. Romance replaces history - 'romances are more
entertaining than history itself, and ... thereby breed a dislike to that
useful study' (Moore xciv) - seducing young minds away from 'all the
substantive parts of knowledge[,] withdrawing] the attention from
nature, and truth; and fill[ing] the mind with extravagant thought,
and too often criminal propensities' (Beattie, Novel and Romance, 327).
Beattie writes this in 1783, and his rhetoric endows the romance itself
with Revolutionary qualities, spilling over from the one just ending
and foreshadowing the one to come. Beattie's romance provides illicit
pleasures, the force of which he cannot deny and yet cannot condone:
if the young reader must amuse himself (Beattie's readers are male), 'if
he must ... indulge himself in this way now and then, let it be spar-
ingly, and seldom' (Beattie, Novel and Romance, 327). Whether arch
and knowing or condemnatory, Beattie's tone sexualises romance-
reading, creating an erotic zone for 'sex in the head' that necessitates
self-control. The violence that reading romances does to one's mind
and, presumably, morals, balanced with the social advantages offered
by perpetuating the ideals of chivalry and emulating the refined world
of the romance create a self-feeding loop: romance has 'given an
amiable name to vice' 41 and it has offered an alternative to worldly
expressions of vice. It both replaces and reinforces history, and in that
way both supports and undermines 1790s establishment culture.
Perhaps one way to unravel this paradox is through a closer look at
the aesthetics of vicarious experience. Even as one rejects the world in
favour of the 'fairy land of romance', one imports into that land the
expectations, and plot-line, of the world. The refining carried out by
the 'good' romance depends on the existence of that which is to be
refined. One of the reasons the romance is dangerous lies in its
praiseworthy purity: as readers experience the romance, vicariously
living the lives they read about, they experience the emotions that
would accompany a real-world equivalent event, but their experience
is artificial, void of real-life complications, and finite. Repeatedly
undergoing such vicarious experience leads to satiation, worry many
of the writers on the romance from the 1780s onwards. Barbauld most
fully develops this thesis, noting too that it is not only pleasant scenes
that attract readers:

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36 The Romantic Paradox

It is, indeed, no ways extraordinary that the mind should be

charmed by fancy, and attracted by pleasure; but that we should
listen to the groans of misery, and delight to view the exacerbations
of complicated anguish, that we should chuse to chill the bosom
with imaginary fears, and dim the eyes with fictitious sorrow,

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seems a kind of paradox of the heart, and only to be credited
because it is universally felt. (Barbauld, Novel and Romance, 282) 42

The Burkean sublime underpins Barbauld's reasoning here: we enjoy

such scenes because we know we are safe from them. But they
nonetheless arouse emotions, the satisfying of which is itself pleasur-
able: 'The painful sensation immediately arising from a scene of
misery, is so much softened and alleviated by the reflex sense of self-
approbation attending virtuous sympathy, that we find, on the whole,
a very exquisite and refined pleasure remaining, which makes us
desirous of again being witnesses to such scenes, instead of flying from
them with disgust and horror' (Barbauld, Novel and Romance, 283).
This in turn creates a more problematic 'paradox': 'But the apparent
delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror, where our
moral feelings are not in the least concerned, and no passion seems to
be excited but the depressing one of fear, is a paradox of the heart,
much more difficult of solution' (Barbauld, Novel and Romance, 283).
The lack of moral engagement with the feeling aroused by the
romance means that they cannot be used, only felt; the romance
encourages gratuitous emotions, useless impulses. Barbauld develops a
theory of vicarious suffering, of vicarious participation in the romance
world, that draws readers in and keeps them coming back for more: an
addiction whose high is the successful resolution of fictional traumas.
Readerly satisfaction is only more fully enhanced by the attractiveness
of the experience, its nature as an aesthetic object: we derive pleasure
from its form and from the feelings it inspires.

The pain of suspense, and the irresistible desire of satisfying curios-

ity, when once raised, will account for our eagerness to go through
an adventure, though we suffer actual pain during the whole course
of it. We rather chuse to suffer the smart pang of a violent emotion
than the uneasy craving of an unsatisfied desire Hence, the
more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstances of a
scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it A judi-
cious author [, therefore,] will never attempt to raise pity by
anything mean or disgusting. As we have already observed, there

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 Reviving the Romance 37

must be a degree of complacence mixed with our sorrows to

produce an agreeable sympathy; nothing, therefore, must be admit-
ted which destroys the grace and dignity of suffering— (Barbauld,
Novel and Romance, 284, 285)

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In this self-gratifying world, a kind of voyeuristic imperative is
created; the satisfaction comes from experiencing the experience,
from observing the adventures of others, and as with most addictions,
readers become jaded: 'Romance-writers... make great misfortunes so
familiar to our ears, that we have hardly any pity to spare for the
common accidents of life' (Barbauld, Novel and Romance, 289). And so,
in exaggerated terms: by immersing oneself in the world of the
romance, one both loses interest in, and lacks a susceptibility to, the
events of real life. Hence, the status quo is preserved through a kind of
general inaction - which is also the problem.
The complexities of this paradox arise from the critical inability to
decide whether the romance was/is good or bad. Chivalry allows for -
even encourages - a vicarious displacement, an absorption, of fear; on
the other hand, by its own code it exists to repress violent impulses
and maintain order. As a code, it relies on and enacts fear and repres-
sion even as it dresses up its tactics in the flowery language of the
romance. The gallantry that considered female chastity its highest
treasure, for instance, also enforced such chastity and regarded sexual
women as temptresses - enchantresses. The chivalric code does not
transcend, but rather requires, attention to order and social cohesion
and homogeneity. The Green Knight stands out for his colour, which
marks him a deviant; Tom Paine is marked by 'deviant' language,
Mary Wollstonecraft by 'deviant' behaviour. If the romance 'is char-
acterised primarily as a form which simultaneously quests for and
postpones a particular end, objective, or object' (Parker 4), then one
can see the 1790s as sanctioning a perpetual romance of postpone-
ment in its inability - or refusal - to decide whether 'romance' was the
hero or the villain of the decade. The reality of Revolution, repression,
social change and disintegration is countered by the fantasy of order
and stasis offered by chivalry, its modern equivalents, and the
romance. The genre becomes a site, or tournament, within which the
inconsistencies, contradictions and disagreements joust endlessly. The
strength of the myth of romance lies in its ability to write its own
stories; because the attractions of chivalry and romance are strong,
and very real, their provenance is glossed over. At the end of Hubert de
Sevrac, however, Robinson indicates her personal rejection of the form

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38 The Romantic Paradox

on which she has based more than 300 pages by undercutting its
reliance on the status quo of class:

So terminated the eventful history [happily]; which exhibits a series

of misfortunes, the effects of those CAUSES, which cannot fail to

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prove, that however exalted the aggressor, the hour of retribution
is inevitable; that energy and philosophy will triumph over adven-
titious claims; and, that -
'Whoever 'midst the sons
Of REASON, VALOUR, LIBERTY, or VIRTUE
Displays distinguished MERIT, is A NOBLE
of NATURE'S OWN CREATING!'
THOMSON (318-19)

In this way she subverts one of chivalry's main requirements, and

begins to dismantle the institution as a whole.
The central paradox of the romance, however, is its engagement
with violence on a variety of textual levels; the cultural inability to
decide the status of the romance thereby allows poets to rewrite and
refocus its terms. As early as 1715 Huet declares that 'Love ought to
be the Principal Subject of Romance' (Huet, Novel and Romance, 46).
And yet, as this chapter has discussed, more than anything else the
romance relies on violence. Chivalry provides a fantasy of order that
disguises the imposition of order with ceremony, and sets aside the
reality of revolutionary violence by promising an invariable happy
ending (even Robinson provides this). But as subsequent chapters will
show, this is increasingly traded for violence in the poetical romances
of the 1790s onwards. The dreams, allusions, uncertainties, silences
and incompleteness that distinguish 1790s romantic violence arise
from a desire to relocate violence from reality to the romance, where
it can be more cleanly dealt with. And yet, the suspension and inde-
cision inhabiting theoretical tracts find their analogues in the
poetry's incapacity to treat violence directly. The vicarious terror
offered by this new version of romance is doubly deflected: fiction-
alised, and then evaded. The next chapter will discuss the
intellectualised sexual violence offered by a style of poetry that freely
explored erotic longing, as long as it was on paper and at a distance.
As an ironic twist on Wollstonecraft's call for a 'revolution in Female
Manners', Delia Cruscan poetry quite bluntly trafficked in the desire
that love be the principle subject of romance.

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2
Sexing the Romance: the Erotic
Violence of the Delia Cruscans

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'Abortive thoughts that right and wrong confound' 1

William Gifford's intemperate responses to English Delia Cruscanism,

The Baviad and Maeviad, have influenced readers of this poetry ever
since - or rather, non-readers, since Gifford's jeremiad has taken the
place of the original for most. As Jerome McGann points out,
however, Gifford's condemnation rests on a more thorough under-
standing of the dynamics of the poetry than its deeply negative,
scurrilous, and potentially libellous tone makes enlightened modern
readers comfortable acknowledging.2 Amid Gifford's indignant reac-
tionism, in his descriptions of poetic cuckolding, 'obscene' imagery
and 'crude conception[s]', his completely accurate statement stands
out: 'the two "great luminaries of the age" [Delia Crusca and Anna
Matilda3], as Mr. Bell calls them, fell desperately in love with each
other' (Baviad and Maeviad, xii). Delia Cruscan poetry, in its English
incarnation, charts a romance in terminology that offends the sensi-
bilities of sensibility: it is too physical, too open, too desiring, too
expressive. Most dangerously, it allows for, even encourages, the poet-
icising of erotic attraction. Readers of The World in 1787-8 watched
breathlessly as Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda fell in, and then out of,
love; the serialisation of their romance was then packed up and
produced in book form in The British Album, first in 1788 but going
through several editions until 1794.4 Gifford's horror arises as much
from the lasting spectacle of men and women openly declaring love
and physical desire as it does from aesthetic concerns: poetry itself was
being violated, its classical purity put in the service of a pornographic
emphasis on the passions. Gifford's chivalric attitude towards a help-
less genre provides another instance of the critical chivalry discussed

39

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40 The Romantic Paradox

in the last chapter; the Baviad and Maeviad resounds with outrage at
the 'false glare, [and] incongruous images' (43) that deface Delia
Cruscan poetry. When poetry is put to the service of conveying phys-
ical desire, we infer, it is inevitably tainted, while romance loses any
claim to protection once it descends to the level of sex.

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Readers of The World and The British Album, however, were trans-
fixed by the romance between Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda; it
offered the promise of a 'real-life' exploration of the heights and
depths of fantasy - of romance. As the previous chapter discussed, the
last few decades of the eighteenth century found the romance cease-
lessly interesting; repeatedly, writers attempted to define and dismiss
the genre, the resilience of which showed in their periodic critical
returns. Consensus was found in the decision that the romance was
unreal: its purity, its unworldliness, the prominence that it gave to a
love which conquered all, lent it a lustre not found in 'real life'.
Although, as Chapter 1 established, the romance owed more to the
world than many commentators gave it credit for, nonetheless its
immediate appeal was seen to be its blissful sojourning in the vales of
true love. Sensibility, familiar to novel-readers in the 1780s, was
romance intensified, a celebration of emotional attachment between
lovers, of female endurance, and of the triumph of love over lust. For
Gifford, a signal crime of Delia Cruscanism was its contradictory devo-
tion to sensibility; even as its sensual language fell foul of sensibility's
celebration of virtue, its plotline depended heavily on a scenario of
love deferred - a plotline eventually exploded, as I will discuss later in
this chapter. Gifford's view is endorsed by McGann, who situates
Delia Cruscanism as exemplifying 'the poetics of sensibility'. But
Gifford's visceral hatred indicates what McGann, despite his descrip-
tion of the erotics of the poetry, successfully elides: the romance
between Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda offends sensibility exactly
because it is sexual, rather than sensual. The ordered and balanced
purity of romance is conquered by the fiery passions and bodily
desires voiced in their amatory verse.
Understanding the impact of Delia Cruscan poetry, then, means
confronting its physicality, its willingness to undermine the conven-
tions of purity in the romance and to focus on the sexuality of love.
What is at stake is the protection of virtue, the perpetuation of the
ideology of romantic love as thoroughly uninformed by physicality.
Although heroines and heroes are as much celebrated for their physi-
cal charms as for their moral beauties, for the most part readers are
meant to understand that outer reflects inner - that physical beauty is

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 41

both the reward for and marker of inner worth. 5 The romance subor-
dinated bodily responses to the lasting attractions of soulmates, and
readers understood that pants and sighs, perhaps the pressure of the
hand, functioned only as choreography, culminating in the chaste
embrace that signified the meeting of like with like rather than solely

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of lip with lip. Delia Cruscan poetry uses the available vocabulary of
romance; as I will discuss later in this chapter, the exchange collected
in The British Album follows with little deviation the plot conventions
familiar to its readers, with the signal difference that it is entirely epis-
tolary. Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda correspond through poetry, but
their exchanges convert the absence of bodies into a paradoxical pres-
ence: the corpus of their love is composed of print. And yet physicality
and bodily responses are crucial to their romance, and it is this aspect
that undoes the balanced nature of the ideology of romance, and that
provokes Gifford's charges of obscenity. English Delia Cruscanism can
be compared to the proverbial still waters; its depths conceal trans-
gressions against romance itself. Its superficial simplicity, however,
and its ornate, decorative diction - even by 1793 falling from fashion
- combined with Gifford's polemic to bury it from critical notice.
Edward Bostetter's 1956 article makes only passing reference, concen-
trating on 'the original Delia Cruscans' rather than the 'affected and
silly group of sentimental versifiers' who succeeded them. W.N.
Hargreaves-Mawdsley's 1967 book The English Delia Cruscans and Their
Time focuses almost entirely on Robert Merry and his possible influ-
ence on the canonical Romantic poets. 6 McGann's and Judith Pascoe's
more recent studies take the poetry more seriously, and in so doing
find the poetry addresses some serious concerns: issues of genre,
gender and subjectivity all find play.
Approaching the poetry not as 'romantic' but as 'romance',
however, allows its importance to this study to emerge. The romance
of wooing that underpins the poetry of The British Album and its
frequent appeals to bodily desire constitute a form of generic violence
- any expectations of purity are shattered by the ecstasies of longing
in this romance. And yet outright rebellion against the strictures of
decorum does not occur. As McGann notes, 'what is absolutely crucial
to understand about this kind of writing is its extreme formality. Its
world is figured, consciously artificial pleasure is fraught with its
reciprocal pain ... a complex pattern of nested tensions gradually
unfolds itself (86-7). Delia Cruscan poetry both formalises the roman-
tic relationship and submerges violent impulses in ecstatic expressions
of desire. The relationship between the control imposed by 'formality'

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42 The Romantic Paradox

and the potential loss of control figured by Gifford's description of the

poetry as an 'epidemic malady ... spreading from fool to fool'
('Introduction', Baviad and Maeviad, xii) results in Delia Cruscan
poetry's continual struggle against its own emotive violence, its
constant appeal to general stability, and its as-constant rejection of

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order and control. Delia Cruscan poetry projects an erotics of form, a
teasing opening to the world of sexual pursuit: the barrier separating
romance and pornography. When Delia Crusca conjures up Anna
Matilda's body and poeticises his desires concerning that body, he
imports into the romance the disorder of emotional violence, of
potential loss of control, and the erotic privileging of a frankly male
gaze - but he wraps it in the calming package of romance. Romantic
love and sexual desire are entwined, and the erotic worlds created by
the poetry violently disrupt the expectations of purity and virtue asso-
ciated with love poetry.
Violence, then, is not overt or bloody in Delia Cruscan poetry, but
rather generic; in their creation of a love poetry dependent on excita-
tion and continually sparked desire, Delia Cruscan poets provoke a
confrontation between genre and representation. The natural effu-
sions they describe - spontaneous overflows of poeticised feeling - are
reined in by poetry itself; as Pascoe notes, 'Merry's poems written in
the guise of Delia Crusca are ... prosodically unexceptional,
composed almost exclusively in rhyming couplets of iambic tetra-
meter' (80), while Hannah Cowley's Anna Matilda responses are
equally formal, resembling the lush and elegant outpourings of her
contemporary, Anna Seward.7 The poetry is both genuine and artificial,
structured and spontaneous, even as the romance is both effective and
laboured, sincere and theatrical. What McGann calls 'anti-nature' (78)
undergirds a style that exploits the conventions of love even as it
records the progress of a romance. Readers of the original serial
witnessed the growth of an affair, unfolding over many months, but
its full romantic force resides in the two volumes of The British Album,
volume one ornamented with an engraving of Delia Crusca, volume
two with the likeness of Anna Matilda. 8 These portraits only heighten
the theatricality that Pascoe discusses, since neither Delia Crusca nor
Anna Matilda exist - they are romantic constructs, mere masks. But
the introduction of the visual nonetheless combines with the appar-
ent sincerity of the verse to maintain the illusion of reality: readers are
offered, not the fiction of sensibility, but the irresistible allure of a
'real' romance, written with the fire of immediacy, linked to time and
place in both the pages of The World and of The British Album, where

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 43

each poem is signed with the poet's Delia Cruscan name and the orig-
inal date of newspaper publication. Readers, then, are privy to a
private - hence true - romance, conducted by 'real' people, following
familiar rules of romance, spiced with sex. The fourth wall is simulta-
neously up and down: the suspension of disbelief endows the

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poet-players with reality, which in turn galvanises their passion and
colours their romance with illicit lust, all very correctly, elegantly and
decoratively written.
In discussing the Delia Cruscans, I mean to explore the dichotomy
between false and sincere in their declaration of love and desire, the
potential for disorder predicated by the version of a bodily, yet print-
bound romance. The dynamics of heterosexual romance embraced by
Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda play a signal part, but before looking
in detail at their romance it is important to discuss the eroticism
McGann mentions but does not fully engage with. McGann's useful
description of the Delia Cruscan style as based on the troubadouran
stil novisti and his characterising of the Delia Crusca/Anna Matilda
romance as a 'specifically heterosexual erotic exchange' (81) imports
both love and lust, but he does not develop his insight. In particular,
associating The British Album poetry with that of the troubadours
introduces the element of direct address evident in so many Delia
Cruscan poems: when the poets entitle their offerings 'To —' they are
signalling the private, epistolary nature of the poem even as they alert
their readers to this in a very public fashion. The first part of this
chapter, then, investigates the philosophy of feeling in Delia Cruscan
poetry, where the amatory stands in for the intellectual and creates
the erotic tenso noted by McGann. After this, the chapter will focus on
the romance between Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda, where readers
learn that the course of true love never runs smoothly, and indeed can
only end in tears. Throughout, the Delia Cruscan fascination with the
imagery of physicality, its easy slide into the language of physical
suffering, and the twining of love with forms of metaphorical violence
will be evident.

The erotics of apostrophe: emotional bondage

In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton defines the aesthetic as

a contradictory, double-edged concept. On the one hand, it figures

as a genuinely emancipatory force - as a community of subjects
now linked by sensuous impulse and fellow-feeling On the

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44 The Romantic Paradox

other hand, the aesthetic signifies what Max Horkheimer has called
a kind of 'internalised repression', inserting social power more
deeply into the very bodies of those it subjugates To lend fresh
significance to bodily pleasures and drives... is always to risk fore-
grounding and intensifying them beyond one's control. 9

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Eagleton describes the binding power of a shared aesthetic in both its
definitions: it both attaches, and restrains. The aesthetics of direct
address that operate in Delia Cruscan poetry perform a similar
manoeuvre: desire is freed and the desired openly identified, which
encourages displays of emotion even as it conforms to expectations of
genre, the aesthetic known as 'romance'. Moreover, Eagleton high-
lights the tendency of the body to escape the control of language;
once gestured towards, the body assumes a primacy in relations that
belies the intangibility of a purely print-bound relationship. Delia
Cruscan poetry privileges the invisible body; it directs the reader's
gaze towards the corpus that makes up the textual romance, and it
encourages a voyeuristic engagement with the privacy of a love affair.
The epistolary mode facilitates the contradictory public/private stance
affected by the poets: even as lovers address private love-letters implic-
itly written only for the eyes of the beloved, they also publicise their
affair. The destination of the poetry - the periodical The World - liter-
alises the 'worldly' aspect of public love. The aesthetic, the body, the
gaze, and lovers' vows congregate in the space reserved for declara-
tions of desire, and in this way apostrophe ensures the visuality of
romance, the specularisation of sexual desire.
As McGann notes, 'the basic structure of the verse is exactly erotic
because it proceeds by acts of intercourse that are at once perfectly
immediate and purely imaginative. [It is] sex in the head' (82), but it
also appeals to the body, to a range of embodied emotions requiring
both the stylised emotive sentiment of love poetry and the liberating
raptures of textual desire. Delia Cruscan apostrophe creates an aesthet-
ics of lust disguised as love; the frequent invocations of passion
translate longing into a kind of textual gratification. Even as, for
instance, the sublime requires a body to react to what the mind half
perceives, half creates, so too Delia Cruscan love relies on a poetic
embodiment to define fully its aesthetics of desire. Peter Brooks
contends that 'poetics ... is the necessary grounding of aesthetics'. 10
The Delia Cruscans literalise this: under their handling poetics ground
aesthetics, emphasising the concrete, disarranging the purities of
mind, solidifying the abstract, philosophical appreciation of beauty

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 45

into straightforward declarations of the necessity of bodily gratifica-

tion. The dangers of vicarious emotion, the risk they offer to
emotional stability (described by Barbauld and discussed in the previ-
ous chapter) re-emerge in Delia Cruscan exchanges. The luxuries of
woe and joy indulged in situate the readers as both the receptacle for,

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and the putative object of, the poet's transports. The apostrophic
content of many of the poems invite readerly participation in the
objectification of the beloved: whether it is Melissa's lips, or Anna
Matilda's breast, or Miss Campbell's dead body, the poems concoct a
special relationship between poet, subject and reader, a menage-d-trois
that capitalises on the erotics of the gaze, and the aesthetics of specu-
larisation. As Maria Dibattista notes, 'the aesthetic originates,
biologically, in aesthesis, in the perceptions of the sensitized body'. 11
Delia Cruscan apostrophe traces the aesthetic to its source, offering
the aroused body as its site, and deconstructing the purities of visual
love, that is, romantic love based on the non-sexual visual plundering
of beauty. In fact, in Delia Cruscan poetry the poetic becomes the
mode of love: poetry embodies love, and the body submits to love.
Conquest is assured as soon as writing begins, so that, even if the
poem concludes in denial, possession has always already occurred. 'If
the eyes fix themselves on a certain object, it is to immobilize it so
that the gaze can work its dark magic, project its own fantasies, enact
its own desires upon it ... Scopophilia offers the possibility of the
libidinal sublimation that takes root in the gaze; in other words, the
aesthetic' (Dibattista 172). The control promised by the gaze -
rendered poetically, in direct address - leads to an aesthetic based on
emotional extravagance and bodily indulgence: intercourse that is
textual, and emotively sexual.
Most Delia Cruscan erotic apostrophe, aside from the Anna
Matilda/Delia Crusca exchange, 12 emanates from the male pen:
Benedict, Arley, Delia Crusca himself, the Bard; and the poems apos-
trophise female objects: public women (actresses), private 'ladies'
(daughters), and errant females. The exception, the Emma/Henry
exchange, plays in significant ways upon the poetry/body association;
the others more straightforwardly objectify their targets. They func-
tion like toasts, given over the port after the ladies have retired: they
publicise private virtue, and admire the public performance of virtue.
They romanticise their subjects even as they invite readers to consume
them visually: the pleasure gained from looking overcomes the propri-
eties. The lover's (or admirer's) private viewing of his beloved is
transformed into the theatrical experience of being one of many - a

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46 The Romantic Paradox

member of an audience. This is especially apt in the poems Delia

Crusca addresses to three leading actresses of the day: Sarah Siddons,
Kitty Wells and Mary Farren. Indeed, given Siddons' reputation as the
Queen of tragedy (or 'Pathos', in Delia Crusca's words) the poem
encourages a reading - that is, viewing - of Siddons as dramatically

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associated with violence itself, in many guises. Her voice frightens
'pale FEAR', 'dark-brow'd REVENGE', 'gelid HORROR', 'lost DESPAIR',
and 'barefoot MADNESS'.13 Siddons was celebrated for the power of her
voice, and Delia Crusca picks up on that, binding her textually in the
effects of her own utterances. Through its power, Delia Crusca
suggests, she effectively rules the negative passions; confined in Delia
Crusca's poem, she exists as 'Mrs. Siddons', Queen of Pathos, and her
identity as such is emphasised when Delia Crusca relegates the softer
passions of 'Pity, and generous-minded Love' (39) to a single stanza.
Having situated Siddons at the head of the train of passion, Delia
Crusca enlists the Muse in what becomes a sexual appreciation of
Siddons; from extolling her dramatic skill, Delia Crusca sublimates
performance into the emotions it portrays, and from there recalibrates
Siddons' appeal as that of the desirable woman:

Ah! let not then my fond admiring Muse

Restrain the ardour of her song,
In silent wonder fix'd so long,
Nor thou! From humble hands the homage meet refuse.

And I will hasten oft from short repose,

To wake the lily, on moist bed
Reclining meek her folded head;
And chase with am'rous touch the slumber of the rose.

Then will I form a votive wreath

To bind thy sacred brows, - to deprecate thy scorn.
(40-8, 51-2, emphasis added)

Delia Crusca uses the aesthetic control offered by direct address to

transform Siddons from actress to heroine in a mini-romance starring
the poet; she moves from affector to affected, from powerful to
passive. By apostrophising her beauties, Delia Crusca takes them over,
and redeploys his admiration as desire - to 'bind' Siddons in the
confines of his poem. Romance is privileged, but its privacy is severely

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 47

compromised: Siddons' public persona facilitates Delia Crusca's public

adoration, and justifies his public gaze.
Siddons is thus transformed from Queen of Pathos to Queen of
Hearts, and resituated as a sexualised body rather than an affecting
voice. In addressing Mrs Wells and Miss Farren, Delia Crusca performs

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similar manoeuvres. Both actresses inspire poetry through their
strength and skill as public figures; both are reduced to desirable
bodies, open to view for any reader. In 'Ode to Simplicity: Addressed
to Mrs. Wells', Wells exemplifies simplicity, and invites praise for her
artlessness,14 but even so attracts Delia Crusca sexually: 'And
Loveliness delights to dwell,/ Upon thy bosom's snowy swell,/ To bid the
streamy lightnings fly,/ In liquid peril from thine eye' (43-6, first empha-
sis added). The attractiveness of simplicity - of naive, fresh, childlike
sensibility - plays up Wells's new poetic status as heroine to Delia
Crusca's poetic hero, while the swell of her snowy breast conveys
uncomplicated desire: the reader's eyes are directed at a body part, the
mind encouraged to conjure an erotic image. 'Ode to Miss Farren' goes
even further; even as she gives the 'Temper' of Love (6), Farren is the
object of the 'gaze' of 'happy youths' (19), her attractions thoroughly
physical: 'Oh, what delight to hourly trace/ The fine expression of thy
Face,/ Thy willing elegance, and ease;/ To see those teeth, of lustrous
pearl,/ Thy locks profuse of many a curl,/ And hear thy voice, omnipo-
tent to please!' (31-6). Although her voice pleases, it is subordinated to
her face, hair and teeth: Farren is there to be looked at, rather than
listened to. The attractions of all three women are visual: the poetry
exists to paint word-pictures, while expressions of admiration soon
slide into declarations of desire. Delia Crusca treads a fine line in these
poems; as actresses, Siddons, Wells and Farren are available to the
public gaze by profession, and it is no unusual move to emphasise an
actress's body or construct her as sexually desirable. However, Delia
Crusca simultaneously wants them to be pure romance heroines,
susceptible to his heroic attentions, and sexually available bodies,
open to a lover's advances. His love poetry thus complicates itself: it is
both highly romantic and sexually charged, a complexity more
evident, and more significant, in his intercourse with Anna Matilda.
The apostrophised actresses - whose poems briefly interrupt the Delia
Crusca/Anna Matilda exchange in their printed order in The British
Album - serve to allow Delia Crusca to energise his emotions, collect
his thoughts, and practise his pick-up lines.
When the object of the apostrophe is not an actress, but rather a
'private' woman - respectable, genteel - desire and violence interact

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48 The Romantic Paradox

more forcefully. 'General Conway's Elegy for Miss C. Campbell',

'Epitaph on Miss Campbell', and 'Marquis Townshend's Verses on
Miss Gardiner' have in common the death of the their subjects - more
specifically, the moment of death, again focusing on the body. In
these poems, the point at which the body becomes mere clay signals

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deepest desirability, as in 'General Conway's Elegy':

Ere the stern Sisters cut the vital thread,

I saw, and kiss'd her on the fatal bed,
Just as her gentle spirit took its flight,
And her faint eye-lids clos'd in the endless night;
No strong convulsions shook her parting breath;
No tremors mark'd the cold approach of Death:
Her heart still heav'd with vital spirit warm
And each soft feature wore its wonted charm.
(41-8, emphasis added)

Miss Campbell occupies a liminal space between life and death - warm
enough to be kissed, cold enough not to respond - and General
Conway bestows the opposite of the fairy-tale hero's kiss, ushering her
into death instead of bringing her back to life. The scene is touchingly
erotic, visually meaningful. Miss Campbell, a proper lady, simultan-
eously lies on her private couch and in a public bed; she is exposed to
the public gaze and dies, kissed into the grave, loved to death. She will
join, now, the common state of death, but will also exist forever on the
verge of death, as her heaving, lifeless breast attests. 'General Conway's
Elegy', like its partners, physically combines love with death, and
focuses attention on the expiring female body: romance resides in the
poignant combination of possession (the kiss) and loss (death).
Possession, however, can be assumed as well as granted. In Benedict's
series of sonnets to Melissa, he postulates a continually deferred love;
each sonnet contains a burst of desire, both sated and further tempted
by the body of the continually elusive Melissa. In 'To Melissa's Lips',
Benedict apostrophises only that part of his love he hopes to gain, her
'balmy lips' (1), fresher than a rose-bud, warmer than the morning sun,
brighter than the blossoms of the thorn (5, 6, 7). Melissa exists only as
lips in this sonnet, a freakish synecdoche that allows the speaker to
privilege bodily desire: 'Dear lips! — permit my trembling lips to press/
Your ripen'd softness, in a tender kiss:/ And, while my throbbing heart
avows the bliss,/ Will you — (dear lips!) the eager stranger bless?'
(9-12). The close rhyme enhances the sense of lips - alike but different

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 49

- approaching lips, while also inducing an erotic sense of inevitability.

And yet, as the earlier mention of the thorn bush foreshadows, these
lips are guarded by a 'beauteous owner' (13) who reclaims her body
part and flirtatiously threatens violence: '"Ah, fond request!... / Cease,
wayward youth! — whoever touches - dies!"' (13-14). The actual death

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that accompanies General Conway's kiss is here made playful, but
nonetheless it as effectively removes the body from further contact.
Whether claimed by death, or by a 'beauteous owner', lips are not as
free as they seem, and their connection with death complicates the
desire inhabiting Delia Cruscan poetry. Even as 'kissing lovers enter ...
the tactile body' (McGann 84), so death corrupts the tactile body, and
prevents the consummation of love and desire.
Benedict accepts Melissa's rebuff, and although he continually
returns to her body in subsequent sonnets, he does so at arm's length,
occupying the voyeur's rather than the lover's space, and sharing with
his readers the visual aesthetic of desire. In 'To Melissa' he again
invokes the kiss, but this time a curiously ethereal one: 'Whene'er thy
angel-form salutes my eye' (1), he begins, utilising both the visual and
tactile meanings of 'salute' - 'whenever thy angel-form comes into
view', and 'whenever thy angel-form kisses my vision'. This time it is
Melissa who kisses, or who seems to. But again the kiss is deathly:

What tender spasms convulse my beating heart!

My trembling limbs but small support impart;
My aching bosom heaves the deep-drawn sigh!
A wild confusion overwhelms my brain —
My falt'ring tongue cleaves to the parching roof,
My spirits fail!
(2-7)

Benedict's physical symptoms - his pain, convulsions, discomfort -

prove his love, even as they threaten to bring on his death, which he,
Goethe-like, welcomes for the pity it would elicit from Melissa. Love
requires physical symptoms; death itself acts as a proof of love. These
are not exactly original ideas, but rather a congregation of romantic
cliches remarkable more for their insistence on the convulsing body
than the suggestion of lovesickness. The poem's concentration on the
physical continues the Delia Cruscan theme of embodied desire, and
of erotic need. Benedict's sonnet 'Melissa!' makes this clear: as the
exclamation point suggests, the poem encapsulates Melissa from head
to heart:

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50 The Romantic Paradox

Her dark-brown tresses negligently flow

In curls luxuriant, to her bending waist;
Her darker brows, in perfect order plac'd,
Guard her bright eyes, that mildly beam below.
The Roman elegance her nose displays —

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Her cheeks soft blushing, emulate the rose,
Her witching smiles, the orient pearls disclose:
And o'er her lips, the dew of Hybla strays.
Her lib'ral mind, the gentler virtues own;
Her chasten'd wit, instructive lore impart;
Her lovely breast is soft Compassion's throne,
And Honor's temple is her glowing heart.

But I, like Patriarch Moses, praise and bless

The Canaan which I never shall possess!

Benedict's description of Melissa's perfections claims her as his virgin

territory; despite the couplet's despair, the first 12 lines have effec-
tively enclosed Melissa in verse. The first 8 lines of this sonnet, like 'To
Melissa' composed in faux-Petrarchan meter (abba cddc), contain her
physical essence, just as the first 8 lines of 'To Melissa' describe
Benedict's physical decline; the last 6 lines of each poem use
Shakespearean metre (efefgg) to convey images of the mind, of sorrow,
of bodily loss. Thus form and content conspire to, on the one hand,
encourage the loosing of sentiment and desire and, on the other,
restrict both in correct verse form: both 'protective enclosure' and
'imprisonment'. 15
Benedict's sonnets embody Melissa: that is, they give her a body,
and allow the poet to possess it, fuelling his desire in a self-limiting
strategy that both acknowledges possession and defers it. His poems
'to' Melissa bind her securely to him and revel in the luxury of contin-
ually recreating the tenso of erotic attachment. Melissa's beauty
infuses the sonnet, which in turn neatly packages her body. For
Benedict, the romance with Melissa is one-sided, voyeuristic: she
never responds to his passion except in echoes of his own voice. These
sonnets distil Delia Cruscan desire and erotic longing; Benedict's isola-
tion functions as a corollary to his desire for Melissa, which in turn
can only be voiced within the confines of a sonnet. It is both publi-
cised and held in strict control. By contrast, the brief exchange
between Emma and Henry not only allows for the contribution of the
female voice, but it also opens up the confines of form: although both

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 51

write mainly in rhyming iambic tetrameter (with some excursions

into pentameter), within their poems one finds variations of metre
reflecting variations of mood. Moreover, where the poems already
discussed focus on the body of the beloved, for Emma and Henry
poetry and the body of the beloved are explicitly linked: poetry liter-

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ally embodies the lover/poet, so that a poem should be as recognisable
a likeness as a portrait. 16 At least, this is the expectation; as the
Emma/Henry exchange shows, however, it absolutely depends upon
accurate reading. Without 'correct' interpretation - that is, without
the control of the deciding gaze - love itself is at risk. The ideal of the
Poetry/Love link should enable the beloved to read his or her lover in
any poem, but instead this association allows misreading, misdirec-
tion, and misunderstanding. Desire for the beloved overcomes the
romance of love poetry: love is disordered, disarranged. Romance
itself suffers a body blow.
Emma exemplifies this: disappointed in her lover for misattributing
a rival's love-poem to her, in 'Henry Deceived' she reproaches both
Henry, and Love itself: 'GOD OF THE BOW! How blind art thou!/ ....
/ ... oh dull of eye and heart!/ Thou know'st not WHENCE Love's
ardors start;/ And when stiff **'s lines appear,/ Thou whisper'st in my
Henry's ear/ That they are EMMA'S!!' (1, 19-23). Emma is less jealous
of a sexual rival than annoyed that inferior poetry could be thought
hers. '**"s lines are 'stiff - wooden, unnatural - and yet pose a threat:
'Thou, HENRY, ne'er can learn the wounds I felt,/ Whilst you, uncon-
scious, such barbed Satire dealt./ — / What! To be lov'd for Wit I
never own'd!/ And by a STRANGER'S verse to be dethron'd!' (32-3,
36-7). For Emma, the poem itself constitutes a rival; the poetry/body
link is so firmly forged that another person has become unnecessary
for a love triangle to exist. Emma must consequently use poetry to re-
embody herself in Henry's eyes, as well as teach him to read her Self
through her poetry correctly - the one slides seamlessly into the other.
Emma protests against the assumption that she would write conven-
tional love poetry, about 'love betray'd', a 'forsaken Maid', and 'sunny
rays, and misty hills,/ An[d] myrtle groves, and foamy rills' (50, 51,
64-5) - the meaningless rhymes of standard poetic diction - insisting
instead that 'THYSELF - HENRY, thyself alone/ Should stand confest
on love's ETERNAL THRONE;/ Round THEE the brightness of my
Verse should shine,/ Round THEE my living Lays for ever, ever twine!'
(66-9). 17 Henry, the subject of Emma's love, props up Emma's love
poetry; Henry should be able to recognise himself in Emma's verse -
indeed, he should actually exist in her verse, an embodiment of Love

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52 The Romantic Paradox

itself. Transported into poetry, Henry the Reader is Henry Read. Emma
makes plain the current of Delia Cruscan apostrophe - it exists to
embody the beloved, to reconstruct through the loving gaze his or her
physical presence. As Emma instructs Henry, 'if Love thrills not in
each turn/ — / They are not wrote to THEE, nor are their glories

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MINE' (123, 126). Love, the emotion, creates love poetry.
Emma's embodied Love finds further play in Henry's response; he
excuses his misreading by explaining that all his thoughts are of
Emma anyway, and then restructures himself physically:

How burst the Music on my ear!

The only Music Henry bears to hear!
I felt it! - each strong nerve inflame!
Like a new soul usurp my heart,
And rage and burn in ev'ry part!
Ah! sure, not even Death's cold spell
Could the fierce fury of my passion quell!
(13-19)

Thus, in the poem answering Emma's, we again see the apostrophised

body, but despite the address 'To Emma' the body is Henry's; he has
taken Emma's remonstrance to heart and so he, too, only embodies
himself. This both fulfils Emma's injunction that Love equals Henry,
and derails it, for surely Henry's Love equals Emma. The problem lies
in the importation of the erotic into the romantic. Direct address, in
these poems, refocuses love into lust; it emphasises the body, which
here is always unattainable, whether through death, unrequited love,
or misreading. These poems use the tone of romance while pursuing
the satisfactions of the body, and in each case meet with disappoint-
ment. The proprieties of love are bypassed; the private becomes
public. The 'dialectic of ambiguous resistance and stimulations'
figured by McGann (87) spirals around a problematic embrace of
physical desire twinned with the public exposure of private feeling in
the poems. This in turn reacts with the essentially false nature of the
poetry - its theatrical elements evident in the fabric of assumed names
and disguised identities. Apostrophe promotes a fiction of intimacy, a
romance built around declarations of love and desire, but the accom-
panying erotic tension undoes the stability of openly declared love.
The result is emotional bondage: a philosophy of love based on the
control - or creation - of the beloved; the Enlightenment notion that
the word equals the thing allows for the conflation of art and object.

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 53

When the poet addresses the beloved, he or she taps into a flow of
romantic feeling that is both performative and theatrical: playing at
love maintains the play of love, while desire is simultaneously satis-
fied and further stoked. Apostrophising the beloved encourages both
poet and reader to visualise an Other made in the poet's own imagina-

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tion, and, as we shall see with the intercourse of Anna Matilda and
Delia Crusca, this completes the ruin of the romance. Even as the
poets declare eternal attachments, referencing the power of art - their
poetry - as proof, they substitute the poem for the beloved. In recre-
ating the desirable and obtainable physical body in their poems, they
corrupt romance. Contriving an ideology of attachment based on
embodied art, and hemmed in by formal regularity, Delia Cruscan
apostrophe both signals the textual availability of the beloved, and, in
the case of Miss Campbell at least, cuts off the beloved's escape.

Epistolary romance: Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda

anthologised

Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda conduct the most sustained and thor-
oughly plotted romance in The British Album, much of it in poems
entitled 'To Anna Matilda' or 'To Delia Crusca', and direct address
operates for them as it does for the couples discussed in the previous
section: it embodies the beloved, represents and contains desire,
results in decay. What commentators have overlooked, however, is
the precision with which their correspondence maps out the romance
plot, and the inherent limitations to romance it exposes. Delia Crusca
and Anna Matilda rely on expressions of extremes: they invoke frantic
passions and kindling emotions. As their affair progresses, they
become increasingly overwrought: Delia Crusca, especially, clings to
physical imagery, importing his idealised - romanticised - female
body into his effusions to Anna Matilda, even rewriting her own self-
description to accord with his romantic needs. Anna Matilda, too,
after some decorously modest attempts to deflect Delia Crusca's atten-
tion with paeans to the feeling mind, turns to the body - her own,
participating in the specularisation of the female form familiar to
romance. 18 Delia Crusca's and Anna Matilda's is a modern romance,
replete with sexuality: readers are privy to exclamations of desire,
displays of sexual jealousy, the intrusion of sexual rivals. As in the
previous section, poetry and lovemaking are identical: bodily passion
resides in, is communicated by, and requires poetry. The body of work
takes over for the body of the beloved, and is correspondingly increas-

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54 The Romantic Paradox

ingly eroticised. Since, however, Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda

conduct a Romantic romance, they are deprived of the most essential
of romantic ingredients: the happy ending. As with the other romance
narratives this book discusses, the Delia Cruscan variety evades
romantic closure; indeed, up to the last poem the pair conduct their

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love affair entirely epistolarily. Poetry literalises love, and it also main-
tains it: the violence of expression for which the Delia Cruscan style
is notorious, and which Gifford labelled obscene, is neutralised by a
poetic style that regularly fits desire and longing into rhyming
couplets. Thus violence exists at the levels of imagery, expression,
structure and style. The love between Anna Matilda and Delia Crusca
perfectly captures Romantic romance: it is violent, poetical, critical of
the genre it invokes, and without hope. In its anthologised form, it
compresses two years of newspaper-bound experience into two
volumes, each poem dated; combined with The British Album's dedi-
cation to R.B. Sheridan, it encodes its own dramatic appeal.
Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda, 'ethereal pseudonyms suggesting
the timeless, slightly out-of-focus nature of romance characters'
(Pascoe 72), exist in a textual world, bound by generic convention,
and yet experimental in their own fashion. What Pascoe calls the
'feminine underpinnings of the romantic endeavor' (72) are made
overt, as Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda indulge in a highly public,
and widely publicised, epistolary affair. The 'Preface' to The British
Album takes care to preserve the literary nature of their passion, and
with it, the proprieties: 'It ought, however, to be recorded, of the cele-
brated Correspondence between DELLA CRUSCA and ANNA
MATILDA, that its genuine enthusiasm arose entirely from poetical
sympathy; for till immediately before the publication of The Interview,
they were totally unacquainted with each other, and reciprocally
unknown'. This protestation is echoed in Volume II, where the
'Advertisement' notes that

Since the printing of the first Edition of these Works, the

Correspondence between DELLA CRUSCA and ANNA MATILDA
has been renewed; - THE EDITOR, therefore, thinks it proper to
continue their respective Writings up to the present time; as also to
insert the beautiful Poems by LAURA, and the one she called forth
from LEONARDO, etc. These later additions are necessary, on
account of the subsequent allusions to them, and because the lines
signed LEONARDO appear to have been produced by the pen of
DELLA CRUSCA.19 (123)

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 55

Besides announcing the appearance of Laura, identified in the text as

Mary Robinson, this passage furthers the notion of an irresistible love
conducted entirely in print, spontaneously reignited, and then
reprinted for the benefit of a curious readership. Considering that 'The
Interview', referred to in the 'Preface' to Volume I, actually appears in

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Volume II (part of the 'renewed' correspondence the 'Advertisement'
publicised as commencing after 'the printing of the first Edition'), the
Delia Crusca/Anna Matilda romance begins to take on the confusing
aura of having pre-existed its own composition. Given the knowing,
romanticised plotline it follows, this is not entirely impossible: instead,
the 'Preface' and the 'Advertisement' build into this love affair the
paradox of being simultaneously spontaneous and scripted. On the
one hand, each poem builds on its predecessor, requiring a pre-exist-
ing condition - despair, admiration, desire - against which to react; on
the other, the stereotyped nature of the responses themselves militate
against spontaneity. Indeed, Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda seem
more intent on satisfying readers' expectations than on successfully
resolving their love, and yet, as I will discuss, their poems also dissect
the nature of romance itself. Their intercourse, compressed into
anthology, highlights the artificiality of romantic ideals, the likelihood
of romantic disappointment, and the unreliability of lasting love.20
In the epistles of Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda, 'words are not so
much reified as personified';21 that is, the words 'Delia Crusca' and
'Anna Matilda' are personified as the lovers Delia Crusca and Anna
Matilda, mutually embodied. Delia Crusca opens their dialogue with
'The Adieu and Recall to Love', in which he constructs for himself a
romantic past, starring himself as the abandoned lover. This poem sets
up the paradigm of Delia Cruscan romance: love hurts, but its very
pain is valuable, because it asserts one's power to feel - that is, to expe-
rience and exhibit Sensibility. Delia Crusca first renounces Love (and
Louisa), only to 'recall' the emotion: 'Go, idle Boy! I quit thy pow'r;/
Thy couch of many a thorn and flow'r/ / O hasten back, then,
heavenly Boy,/ And with thine anguish bring thy joy!' (1-2, 39-40).
This kind of love is all about feeling: Delia Crusca craves sensation,
which is dwelt on, created, lamented, and finally rejected in the
course of the Delia Crusca/Anna Matilda affair. The importance given
to sensation centres the cycle of poems on the feeling body, but even
as this is apparent, both Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda insist on the
primacy of the feeling mind. When Anna Matilda implores Delia
Crusca, in her response, to 'SEIZE again thy golden quill,/ And with its
point my bosom thrill' (1-2), she invigorates the poetry/body/sensa-

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56 The Romantic Paradox

tion/romance matrix; she offers her bosom, erotically, to Delia

Crusca's view, and invites her own penetration. At the same time, the
stylised language and rhyming couplet enclose the subversive force of
such lines within structure: the language of sensibility encourages
erotic responses and guards against impropriety. In this first flurried

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exchange, Anna Matilda takes the unprecedented step of intruding
herself on Delia Crusca's notice, of initiating a romantic exchange
based on poetically physical responses. Delia Crusca picks up on the
implicitly erotic tone, characterising Anna Matilda as his Muse, bring-
ing him pleasure and pain: she is an 'enchanting Maid' whose abstract
attractions are steadily embodied. 'O well thy form divine I know', he
says; he has 'mark'd', 'seen', 'met', and 'view'd' her before ('To Anna
Matilda', 1, 15, 2, 3, 4, 5). But this initial flirtation is checked when
Anna Matilda refuses the place of seductive Muse: even as she directs
his poetic gaze to her body, she recasts herself as older (than who is
left unspecified):

O Timel Since these [artistic skills] are left me still,

Of lesser thefts e'en take thy fill:
Yes, steal the lustre from my eye,
And bid the soft carnation fly;
My tresses sprinkle with thy snow,
Which boasted once the auburn glow;
Warp the slim form that was ador'd
By him, so lov'd, my bosom's Lord —
But leave me, when all these you steal,
The mind to taste, the nerve to feell
(To Delia Crusca', 31-40)

At first it seems as if Anna Matilda wants to redirect her budding

romance with Delia Crusca to a reality in which she - older, faded,
attached to her 'bosom's Lord' - destroys her claims to romantic
availability, and attempts to forestall Delia Crusca's passion. And yet
she also offers her mind to Delia Crusca's ardent notice. 22 Anna
Matilda transfers sensation to the Mind in an effort to intellectualise
her poetic response, but she does so by insisting on the physical
nature of that response. In this way she accomplishes the merging of
Mind and Body, and with it the full physicalisation of 'Anna Matilda'
into the lover Anna Matilda. Love has been relocated to the Mind,
which has been redesignated the receptor of sensation - sex is now
firmly in the head. 23

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 5 7

This means that when Delia Crusca responds 'And art thou then,
alas! like me,/ OFFSPRING of frail mortality?' (To Anna Matilda',
1-2), he is accepting the mind/body merge and directing his love
into the channel prescribed by Anna Matilda. Or at least, he seems
to: although he closes his poem by declaring he loves her mind

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rather than her body ('Unknown, again thou art ador'd,/ As once by
him, thy bosom's "Lord"' [67-8]), he opens it with exclamations of
passion and, again, sensation. 'Methinks, as Passion drives along,/ As
frantic grown, I feel thy Song' (13-14, emphasis added): frenzy and
sensation combine, suggesting that while, for Anna Matilda, 'mind'
is uppermost, for Delia Crusca 'body' holds his attention. This
impression is strengthened when, in the body of the poem, Delia
Crusca replaces Anna Matilda's narrative of age and experience with
one of romantically sheltered feminine beauty and virtue. The epis-
tolary nature of this love affair allows Delia Crusca to write his
version, while Anna Matilda writes hers: although each is inflected
by passion, each also displays 'appropriate' passion, Anna Matilda's
demure, Delia Crusca's forceful. At this point, the affair is inter-
rupted by Delia Crusca's 'Elegy, Written on the Plain of Fontenoy',
the pathos of which affects Anna Matilda, who finds herself trans-
ported there: 'Ha! what a tone was that, which floating near,/ Seem'd
Harmony's full soul - whose is the lyre?/ Which seizing thus on my
enraptur'd ear,/ Chills with its force yet melts me with its fire'
('Stanzas to Delia Crusca', 5-8). Even as she 'sees' Fontenoy,
however, she poeticises a romantic story of sisterly devotion and
sibling death: chaste Love, intertwined with death. As she pleaded
age, now she pleads poetry: she concludes her poem by advocating
poetic transcendence for 'FIRM' minds over sickly sentiment; again,
Mind is uppermost, as is Poetry, while the body and sexual passion
are deflected to the patently non-sexual story of sisterly love. And
again, Delia Crusca responds erotically, describing Anna Matilda as
his lady-love who inspires him to greatness, whose love saves him
from despair, whose wish is his command. The very familiarity of the
developing plot obscures its irregularities (Anna Matilda's indepen-
dence, Delia Crusca's sensibility), while Delia Crusca's continual
re-presentations of Anna Matilda work to transform her from poetic
correspondent to lover, a player in a by-the-book romance, and
adjunct to Delia Crusca's hero-self.24 Anna Matilda abruptly changes
the tone and direction of their romance in her response: T hate the
tardy Elegiac lay - / Choose me a measure jocund as the day!' (To
Delia Crusca', 1-2). As much as this poem chastises Delia Crusca for

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58 The Romantic Paradox

excessive mooning, it also rebukes him for desiring insensibility,

since to love and feel are what make a Poet. Anna Matilda returns to
her original ground: poetry = love = sensibility = poetry. 25 Delia
Crusca is stymied; The British Album inserts odes to Prudence and
Death and an elegy by Delia Crusca, and an 'Invocation to Horror'

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by Anna Matilda, before the romance is resumed.
Anna Matilda has made her point: love is expressed through poetry,
poetry embodies sensibility, sensibility proves one is a Poet. As if
pondering her message, Delia Crusca remains off-stage, while Anna
Matilda receives the poetic attentions of Reuben. The privacy of love
has already been compromised; with the entrance of Reuben, a
'Stranger ... prompted by LOVE' (To Anna Matilda', 1, 4), Anna
Matilda's status as chaste heroine is in jeopardy. She is now publicly
addressed by two suitors, each of whom visualises her embodied form
both as, and through, her poetry; Reuben sees her as a 'speaking paint-
ing' viewed 'as we read' (7, 8), his admiration binding her up in
Poetry. Reuben wants her to be a slave to feeling; he constructs her as
representative of Love, a position that teeters dangerously between
private romance heroine and public woman. Anna Matilda's textual
romance, based on the advertised gimmick that she and her admirers
have never met, threatens to transform her from chaste poetess to
open poetic target. In her response to Reuben, Anna Matilda redirects
the thrust of his desire, asserting love's pain over its allure, and
thereby recreating herself as Love's victim - a damsel in distress rather
than a femme fatale. She also returns to feeling, this time investing it
with violence: love is 'a tyger! - a tyrant', 'a serpent in disguise,/ And
as the lynx, his piercing eyes!/ A raging fire, a deadly pain/ ... / A
fever, tempest, madness he —/ Of all life's ills - a DREAD EPITOME!'
(To Reuben', 31-3, 35-6). Love becomes a monster threatening Anna
Matilda's self-control, and 'to speak more of love' entails actual pain
and torment; 26 plainly, that Reuben can so casually invoke love
proves he does not truly feel the emotion. For Anna Matilda, love
hurts; romantic love translates as physical pain: the mind may rule the
body but its sensations are identical. In romance-plot terms, as well,
Anna Matilda responds implicitly to Delia Crusca's neglect: after her
chivvying of his despairing tone, he has not written back, and indeed
after she publicises her lovesickness, he still does not - at this point he
offers his readers his admiration of Siddons, Wells and Farren, plus
The Slaves, an Elegy', and 'Monody, Addressed to Mr. T.' Despite
Reuben's love, Anna Matilda the romance heroine feels abandoned,
forced to read Delia Crusca's eulogies on the perfections of other

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 59

women. The Delia Crusca/Anna Matilda romance continues along the

expected path: declaration, tiff, neglect.
As if jealous of Delia Crusca's divided attentions, Anna Matilda's
next poem craves 'Indifference'; she continues the theme of love's
pain, and turns on Sensibility itself, a 'cruel imp,' an 'insidious fiend',

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a 'SAVAGE UNTAM'D' ('Ode to Indifference', 51, 65, 79). Indifference,
she implies, will be her protector, now that Delia Crusca has vanished,
and will defend her from suffering: 'thou shield'st the heart from
rankling pain,/ And Misery strikes, when blest with thee, in vain;/ Wan
Jealousy's empoisoning tooth,/ And Love, which feeds upon our youth'
(31-4). Where earlier Delia Crusca wallowed in suffering - proof of the
depth of his emotion - now Anna Matilda exposes her grief and jeal-
ousy, claiming the spectacular, and compromising, position of
abandoned heroine. Again, romance both proceeds and unravels:
Anna Matilda's is a familiar generic position, but once written by
herself it takes on a subjective tinge not usually available to the
heroine, who is more often the object of the romance. As earlier when
she 'initiated a love affair in verse' (Pascoe 68), then declared the
primacy of Mind, then championed open displays of feeling, Anna
Matilda complicates her romantic role. She clearly makes demands on
Delia Crusca, and is not content passively to await his coming: she
both occupies the heroine's space and enlarges its parameters, suggest-
ing a distrust of the usual romance plot-line. She advocates sensation
but also expects a return on her investment in love, preferring to with-
draw when that is not forthcoming. Anna Matilda's advertisement of
her woes works: Delia Crusca finally responds, to tell her that
Indifference allows only 'free[dom] from pain' ('Ode to Anna Matilda',
4), which by extension means freedom from love and, unsurprisingly
at this point, poetry. Emotion produces poetry, which in turn inspires
emotion; Anna Matilda, however, rejects Delia Crusca's overtures, and
enjoins poetry to combat both Delia Crusca and feeling. Retreating
once again to Mind, she attempts to disentangle poetry and feeling:
Thy light'ning Pen 'tis thus I greet,/ Fearless its subtle point I meet; 27 /
Ne'er shall its spells my sad heart move,/ From the calm state it vows
to love' ('Ode to Delia Crusca', 27-30). Anna Matilda and Delia Crusca
engage in a series of feints: she desires indifference, he points out what
she will lose, she implies she has lost it anyway. He in turn seeks indif-
ference - in the hopes of finding Anna Matilda there - but fails utterly
to quell passion and its concomitant physical manifestations: 'Could
I repress quick Rapture's start,/ Or hide the bursting 28 of my heart' (To
Anna Matilda', 31-2). Anna Matilda, textbook-romantic upper hand

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60 The Romantic Paradox

clearly visible, chastises Delia Crusca for succumbing to passion,

which 'tears with fangs unkind' (To Delia Crusca', 22) and compro-
mises Taste, the only path to bliss.29 Triumphantly, she sends Delia
Crusca on a quest for indifference, away from her sphere of influence,
provoking Delia Crusca to declare his intentions openly:

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And have I strove in vain to move
Thy Heart, fair Phantom of my Love?
And cou'dst thou think 'twas my design
Calmly to list thy Notes Divine
That I responsive Lays might send,
To gain a cold Platonic Friend?
(To Anna Matilda', 1-6)

Anna Matilda uses feeling strategically: she lures Delia Crusca back
with displays of pain, and provokes him to plain speech with protesta-
tions of indifference. Feeling and poetry, inextricably linked, combine
to forward plot: the worldly romance Anna Matilda and Delia Crusca
pursue rejects innocence and patience for manipulation and need.
Delia Crusca, having shown his hand, goes further, concentrating on
his vision of Anna Matilda's physical beauty (complete with the
heroine's requisite golden curls30) and his obstructed desire to 'lure
[her] to the chaste caress' (16), although one wonders at the sincerity
of 'chaste'. Calling Anna Matilda's bluff, he advertises his imminent
departure, and his lament that now he and Anna Matilda will never
meet: 'each to each remai[n] - a Shadow and a Shade' (100). Faced with
his loss, Anna Matilda rushes into print: 'Oh stay, oh stay! thy rash
speed check' (To Delia Crusca', 1), but it is too late; Delia Crusca has
gone, her sensations - still felt - are now useless, and her Muse,
deprived of sustenance - feeling - deserts her: 'Expiring, still her note's
the same,/ She murmurs DELLA CRUSCA's namel - / The SACRED
WORLD - ye heard it spoke; - / Her book is clos'd - her Lyre is brokeV
(99-102). By parting the lovers, Volume I closes the book of their corre-
spondence: once the epistles cease, so too does the 'reality' of their
relationship. Anna Matilda indicates the influence of publicity when
she refers to the 'SACRED WORLD' - the poems, of course, originally
appeared in The World newspaper.31 From 10 July 1787 to 17 May
1788, Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda fall in love, a public affair based
on the reciprocity of feeling and poetry and the attractions of the
romance plot. Lurking behind Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda, Robert
Merry and Hannah Cowley manipulate conventions of genre freely:

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 61

even as a recognisable romance plot progresses, neither Delia Crusca

nor Anna Matilda seems fully invested in its development, continually
deferring a meeting; rather, they pursue an alternative romance, that
between poetry and feeling. When Anna Matilda seeks indifference,
only to be thwarted by her emotions; when Delia Crusca builds up his

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dream girl - each does so poetically, reifying the romantic attractions
of form. Once their romance is extracted from The World and re-
presented in The British Album, structure and style jostle for primacy:
love invaded by pain, pain constricted by poetry.
Readers, on tenterhooks - are Anna Matilda and Delia Crusca truly
parted? - must plough through half a volume of the adolescent sex
fantasies of Arley,32 as well as Benedict's sonnets and the
Emma/Henry exchange, before they re-engage with the lovers, whose
story picks up where it left off, albeit five months later (28 October
1788). By now, the Delia Crusca/Anna Matilda romance is taken for
granted, a settled fact: outsiders have noticed it: 'For e'en cold Criticks
have conceiv'd,/So much alike our measures run,/ That ANNA AND
THAT I WERE ONE - / Would it were sol - we then might prove/ The
sacred settled unity of Love' (To Anna Matilda', 49-52). Verified by
critical response, the romance must be followed through; hence, Delia
Crusca finds it is 'vain [to] fly' Anna Matilda (1), and that, moreover,
Anna Matilda needs watching. Only now, apparently, has Delia
Crusca learned of Reuben. Calling Anna Matilda 'faithless Anna' (39),
he asks for permission to return to her: 'bi[d] me still RETURN TO
POETRY - and THEE' (72). As McGann has noted, the Delia Cruscan
world is 'immediate, material, self-conscious, limited to language'
(86). Even as Anna Matilda's exchange with Reuben counts as faith-
lessness to Delia Crusca, so too his poem announcing his desire to
return effects his return - once written, the deed is done. Delia
Crusca's awareness that textual intercourse with one outside the Delia
Crusca/Anna Matilda coupling represents infidelity leads him to
disguise his own indiscretion, an exchange with Laura, whose
'desert[ion] by a FAITHLESS MATE' (To Him who will understand it',
34) leaves her alone and vulnerable. 'Leonardo' replies, offering
condolences and friendship, only to be unmasked as Delia Crusca in a
note to the poem. Further, Anna Matilda sees through the pseudo-
nym; like Emma, who upbraided Henry for failing to understand that
poetry is Self, Anna Matilda knows that, in the Delia Cruscan world,
poetic style embodies one's identity and cannot be hidden. Hence,
Delia Crusca's flirtation with another woman is plainly discerned:
'Hah! Didst thou hope I should not trace/ The mental features of thy

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62 The Romantic Paradox

face?/ / Thou stand'st confest! - thy form is seen' (To Delia

Crusca', 35-6, 42). Delia Crusca's faithlessness, crassly indulged in
even as he professes his desire to return to Anna Matilda, prompts her
simultaneously to reveal and deny her feelings for him. 'Poetic Passions
vainly burn!/ — / Yes, write to LAURA! speed thy sighs,/ Tell her,

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DELLA CRUSCA dies/ . . . . / FALSE Loverl TRUEST Poetl now farewell!'
(40, 43-4, 55). The concatenation of exclamation marks and capital
letters convey Anna Matilda's emotion, while her admission that she
feels 'poetic passions', her declaration that she will not encourage
them ('vainly burn'), and her conflation of false and true, show once
more the primacy of poetry: Delia Crusca's verse is true, revealing his
infidelity. Poetic faithlessness means the end of sensation, since, as
Anna Matilda predicts, his 'Golden Quill' will never again 'with magic
passion ev'ry bosom thrill./ He may write, but ANNA 'twas alone/
Lured down his guardian Goddess from her throne' (87, 88-90). Since
Anna Matilda both is, and inspires, Delia Crusca's Muse, the with-
drawal of her favour means the loss of Delia Crusca's poetic force - the
blunting of his golden quill, and the end of 'Delia Crusca' himself.
Who he is, and what he writes, are as intermingled as Love and Poetry.
At this point Laura intervenes to reassure Anna Matilda that there
was nothing between herself and Delia Crusca - all pretence of
'Leonardo' dropped - but friendship, 33 and to reinforce Anna
Matilda's status as Delia Crusca's embodied Muse, his source of
passionate poetry:

O Anna, since thy graceful song

Can wind the cadence soft among
The heart's fine nerves, and ravish thence
The wond'ring Poet's captive sense;
Till warm'd by thy electric fire,
His yielding soul, with fond desire,
Glows but for Thee - dispel thy fears.
('Laura to Anna Matilda', 1-7)

The ethereal - soul and sense - is infused with physical sensation, as

required by Delia Cruscan passion; poetry functions as a kind of emis-
sion, dependent as ever on the stoking of sensation. Echoing Laura,
Delia Crusca avers that his poetry proves his fidelity merely by being
written: 'And think'st thou, ANNA! that my love,/ Like thine, could
ever faithless prove,/ That in some female Reuben's praise,/ I the
impassion'd verse could raise;/ That I so quickly led astray,/ Could

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 63

wake the warm inconstant lay?' (53-8). Delia Crusca's pointed

reminder of Anna Matilda's own dalliance blends with his images of
poetic arousal ('raise', 'lay') in a clear appeal to the Delia Cruscan
body/poetry link; it signals to Anna Matilda that passion and poetry
can only be inspired by Anna Matilda, and that until she 'bidst the

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measure pour,/ Till then, THY DELLA CRUSCA WRITES NO MORE' (To
Anna Matilda', 109-10). Poetry pours; it has a shape, a physicality, and
an origin in passion, in emotion. As the images build up, poetry is
increasingly eroticised, presented as a response to emotional - that is,
physical - excitation. Delia Crusca's verse will pour forth if Anna
Matilda responds poetically; what has already appeared justifies Delia
Crusca's faith and Anna Matilda's judgement that poetry is the man.
And Delia Crusca is not averse to emotional blackmail: his explicit
accusation concerning Reuben causes Anna Matilda to crumble.
Declaring herself unable to compete with 'favour'd Manf's]' 'sagacious
ART' (To Delia Crusca', 6), 34 she portrays herself as deserted by poetry
- 'Poetic ardors fly me now!' - and overcome by Laura - 'Whilst LAURA
still may dress the lay/ In all the lustre of the day' (64, 93-4). Again,
conventions of romance are followed: the appearance of another
woman provokes jealousy and the breakdown of trust; the man
protests his love; the woman requires proof. And again, convention is
conveyed in an unorthodox manner: the concentration on sexualised
responses and the cultivation of a physical style of poetry inevitably
bring passion and desire into conflict with romance. When Anna
Matilda calls on Delia Crusca to rescue her from her suspicions, she
invokes a body entrapped by poetry and passion: 'But shall not DELLA
CRUSCA sue/ For her who to HIS MUSE is true?/ For ONE, who round
her heart hath wreath'd/ All the rich strains he ever breath'd' (101-4).
All that is left, now, is the actual encounter of bodies.
All along, the romance between Anna Matilda and Delia Crusca has
sustained itself on absence: each lover has created a relationship based
on desire rather than knowledge, and each has followed a personalised
romance plot - Anna Matilda's feeling mind, Delia Crusca's desiring
body - spliced together with the image of embodied, passionate
poetry. It has depended entirely on a textual reality; conducted in
print, it is, finally, both consummated and concluded in print.
McGann says that 'the desire to establish a real equation between
textual and personal erotic means in this text, disaster' (92); Pascoe
notes that the romance's 'fires were cooled by a disappointing
meeting between the matronly Cowley and the younger Merry' (69).
Neither recognises that the only possible solution to the Delia

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64 The Romantic Paradox

Crusca/Anna Matilda romance is a parting - it is generically required,

structurally to be expected from the trajectory their relationship has
followed. Further, however, neither McGann nor Pascoe acknowl-
edges the intensely textual nature of the poem that signals the
romance's conclusion, for The Interview' not only describes the one

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meeting between Anna Matilda and Delia Crusca (not, significantly,
between Cowley and Merry), it also dresses it up in thoroughly roman-
tic robes, and offers closure based on the poetic mingling that, for
each, represents physical contact. That is, consummation is complexly
merged with a romanticised, stylised lovers' parting.
The Interview' plots the end of romance, its subsumation into
purely physical response. It literally intertwines the poets' voices;
although signed by Delia Crusca, it contains passages described as
from the pen of Anna Matilda. Lines and stanzas are begun by Delia
Crusca and finished by Anna Matilda, a technique that embodies both
the artistry and the artifice of their affair. Readers are offered a purely
text-bound but completely intertexted intercourse - sex on the page,
which both consummates and ends the affair. Delia Crusca begins: 'O
WE HAVE MET' (1), and his immediate invocation of the elements'
fury images the failure of their interview. In romance terms, Anna
Matilda has dismissed Delia Crusca; 'haughty Duty' requires her to
declare that 'ANOTHER claims my heart/ .... / ANNA MATILDA
NEVER CAN BE THINE!' (88, 91). Readers are reminded that in her
second verse-epistle Anna Matilda had referred to her 'bosom's Lord';
indeed, readers of The British Album can flip back to Volume I and
reread Anna Matilda's words with a new comprehension. Calling
herself a 'cold Ingrate', Anna Matilda asserts that, nonetheless, 'th'im-
passioned verse is o'er' (96, 71).35 Having lost his lover, Delia Crusca
refuses to give up his love: constancy, portrayed as a feeling superior
even to the possession of Anna Matilda, takes the place of compan-
ionship; the 'loftier bliss' is 'to rave,/ Without a pow'r to aid, a chance
to save' (120-1). Renunciation is figured as the marker of truest love -
Delia Crusca romanticises his loss into a gain, as his enduring love will
furnish him with an endless subject for poetry. Even as he gives up
Anna Matilda, however, Delia Crusca makes one last bid for her body:

- my adoring heart is ANNA'S OWN;

YES, ALL HER OWN, and tho' ANOTHER claim
Her mind's rich treasure, 36 still I love the same;
And tho' ANOTHER, O how blest! Has felt
Her soften'd soul in dear delirium melt,

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 Sexing the Romance: The Delia Cruscans 65

While from her gaze the welcome meaning sprung,

As on her neck in frantic joy he hung,
Yet I will bear it, and tho' Hell deride,
My pangs shall sooth, my curse shall be my pride.
(109-17)

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Poetry creates the body, the giving of which signifies success in love.
Significantly, this fantasy of embodiment occurs after the pair have
intermingled their verse, a placement that suggests that even as Delia
Crusca romanticises renunciation, he publicises consummation:
poetry, the text, having contained and sustained their affair all along,
it is the only site at which they can complete it.
As I have mentioned, then, the pair become lovers literally, sharing
textual space, cohabiting poetry. After Delia Crusca signals his despair
by calling on the elements, he transports his readers to the scene, 'a
garden in Paris'. Delia Crusca, the T, pauses 'to view the mazy dash'
of a waterfall, and muse on his love for Anna Matilda. The next stanza
begins 'Sudden I turn': the speaker hears 'sweet sounds' and 'rush[es]'
to find the source (12, 23, 25, 37). The print, however, is now itali-
cised, and, directed by a note to the text, the reader understands that
the speaker of all the poem's italicised lines is Anna Matilda. Even,
then, as Delia Crusca opens the poem and sets the scene, Anna
Matilda intrudes, inserting her subjective T and placing herself as an
equal partner in this poem of loss. It is Anna Matilda who hears Delia
Crusca's song and turns to find him. The moment of encounter,
however, is doubly italicised, typographically ambiguous, so that the
speaker could be Anna Matilda, Delia Crusca, or both simultaneously:
'AND THERE THE SOFT MUSICIAN CONSCIOUS STOOD' (38). The
poets merge identities in mutual spectatorship - years of writing
visionary poetry culminate in the meeting of eyes/T's and the
mingling of verse. Delia Crusca now speaks, textualising Anna Matilda
as a 'living Angel ... ANNA'S self (43, 46) whom he leads to 'the
woven bower', a traditionally romantic lovers' space. Poeticised
romance requires poeticised closure: Anna Matilda begins to speak, at
first in Delia Crusca's voice (her words are not italicised), only to inter-
vene, mid-line, with her own: '"Lean not to me, th'impassioned verse is
o'er,/ Which chain'd thy heart, and forc'd thee to adore:/ For 01 observe
where haughty Duty stands,/ / Dread Goddess, I obeyl"' (71-3, 77).
This remarkable poem accomplishes typographically exactly what
duty and propriety - catchwords for convention - oppose: the lovers,
only ever textual, come together in the final poem of their affair,

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66 The Romantic Paradox

bound together even as they give each other up. The dual vocality of
The Interview' illustrates most fully the physical nature of Delia
Cruscan romance, and finalises the intrusion of the erotic into the
romantic. Although the sharp-eyed Gifford would denounce the
'weekly cuckold[ing of] her poor spouse in rhyme' figured by the

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exchanges in The World, even he apparently missed the significance of
the very public exchange of poetic fervour contained in this most
commingled of Delia Cruscan verse.
The romance between Anna Matilda and Delia Crusca requires
poetry; it is constructed by poets in disguise, each of whom masquer-
ades as a suitably romantic figure, both of whom participate in the
conventions of romance while introducing the erotics of the body
into the romance paradigm. Their relationship, distilled from the
pages of The World into the package of The British Album, depends on
a chronological reading of their exchange, and is specifically crafted
to follow a familiar plot trajectory: the compiler of The British Album
leaves out Laura's suspicious and arch response to 'Leonardo's' over-
ture, for instance, and changes some titles to dovetail more artistically
with future developments. To this end, Anna Matilda's post-Tnterview
poem', dated 19 June 1789 (The Interview' is dated 16 June 1789) and
entitled T o Delia Crusca - who said, "When I am dead, write my
Elegy"', becomes in the 1792 edition of The British Album, T o
Philander', while still footnoted as 'formerly' to Delia Crusca.37 This
change can be seen to reflect Anna Matilda's subsequent knowledge of
Delia Crusca's final poem, dated 30 June 1791 and entitled T o A - E
B - N'. Despite Tnterview"s protestations of undying love, T o A - E
B - N' shows a Delia Crusca who has not only moved on, but also
changed his mind about true love's expression: 'For HE who dares
assert his grief,/ Who boasts the anguish he may prove,/ Obtains,
perhaps, the wish'd relief,/ BUT O! THE TRAITOR DOES NOT LOVE'
(9-12). By affirming that real love does not reveal itself, but rather
serves and suffers in silence, Delia Crusca dismisses the entirety of his
affair with Anna Matilda, which grew from and relied on open asser-
tion. 38 In a poem that neatly redirects emotion and functions as his
last word, Delia Crusca does more violence to Romance than in any of
his impassioned exchanges with Anna Matilda, and shows that the
most powerful threat to Love is also the most inescapable, and
mundane: the passage of time. In the next chapter, it is the hero who
faces extinction.

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3
Failing the Romance: Coleridge,
Keats and the Wilted Hero

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As discussed in the previous chapter, the romance (as genre) can
merge with romance (as an emotional connection) in defiance of
concrete formal boundaries; the erotic world conjured by the Delia
Cruscans rests on a disruption of the purities of emotional contact
relied on by the romance. And as the repeated returns to definitions
described in Chapter 1 show, the components of the romance troub-
led its readers as much as its overall force. The sexual energy
characteristic of the Delia Cruscan romance emphasised coupling,
romantic partnerships expressed through highly stylised and emotive
poetry. But elements of the romance could be detached and utilised in
unusual forms and unexpected surroundings. In this chapter I will
investigate the character of the hero in the poetry of Coleridge and
Keats, and accompany them on their quests - doomed to failure - for
heroic perfection. While Keats assumes the familiar persona of narra-
tor and projects heroic inadequacy onto his characters, Coleridge
more unusually offers himself as the hero of the text, constructing in
his conversation poems a cyclical quest-romance that sees, in each
poem, a problematic and ultimately fatally flawed presentation of the
Poet as Hero.1 Keats sets the trend for this book's presentation of early-
nineteenth-century treatments of violence in the romance; as I will
discuss, his heroes meet grisly ends in full view of the reader - or they
vanish altogether, a metaphorical but nonetheless telling and visceral
form of creative violence. Coleridge's romance of the self in his
conversation poems shares with other 1790s romancers' texts a more
indirect approach: in his familiar turns to a mystical Divine and inef-
fectual personal retreats, he demonstrates the paradoxical decision
that an ultimate loss of self is preferable to the psychic violence threat-
ened by confronting the self's disintegration. As with Keats, then,

67

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68 The Romantic Paradox

Coleridge's heroic Self and its various failures function on a metaphor-

ical level to unravel the weft of genre; both poets use a familiar trope,
but neither carries it to its familiar conclusion of empowerment and
fulfilment. In clear contradiction of the truism that 'man has been
raised in order to function, in order to address the world like a text

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destined to find its readers', 2 neither Coleridge nor Keats succeeds in
writing heroes who function properly. Like texts destined only to find
their own dissolutions, their heroes commence quests in lands hostile
to the very notion and fabric of heroism; in their failure we can read
another form of violence done to the romance.
Keats and Coleridge treat the relationship between self and hero
differently; for Coleridge, the lack of critical distance established by
the speaker in the conversation poems contributes to their sense of an
emptied personality and a vitiated exploration of Self. In his conver-
sation poems, Coleridge incessantly returns to the Self - that is, the
Self mediated through poetry - fixing the readerly gaze on his own
personal attractions and shortcomings. The romance he creates
centres on his desires and disabilities; self-consciously, he presents his
Persona as always already on the verge of failure, yet unable to resist
the challenge. Coleridge's technique allows an element of performa-
tivity to enter: that is, he takes on the character of 'Coleridge/Poet'
who then enters the fray of his own poetic needs, casting them as
personal and hence as necessary to the formation of masculine iden-
tity. Like the theorists discussed in Chapter 1, Coleridge becomes the
hero of his own tale, but unlike those theorists his goal is not to reha-
bilitate or otherwise affect Romance, but to reconstitute the
Romanticised self - he attempts to be his own champion. That he just
as consistently fails to uphold his own honour illustrates his reliance
on and vexed relationship with the tropes of Romance.
Keats's romances, however, are infused with violence: feuds, trans-
formations, curses and murder underpin these poems. In these
poems, he is no more than storyteller, a kind of bardic voice; it is his
characters who are victimised. Each male protagonist takes in turns
the identities of swain, villain and victim; each dies or else, in
Porphyro's case, dissipates into the distant past. Keats creates situa-
tions in which his heroes lose their virility, their autonomy and their
lives, and in so doing he questions the impermeability of masculin-
ity: doing violence to gender, he romanticises the losses he forces
onto his characters. The famous Keatsian suspension of desire that
characterises the Odes is transformed in his Romances to a satiation
of desire, a punishable offence.

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 69

Both poets, then, are interested in exploring the character and limi-
tations of the hero; Coleridge's contemporary settings and personal
identification of the Self as Speaker and hence as Hero create an unset-
tling intimate drama, whereas Keats's more elaborate, more
conventionally formal romances examine the hero as a creative

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construct. Keats's romances are plot-driven by a detached, often ironic
narrator; Coleridge's are character-centred, focused around the narrat-
ing voice who is bard, hero and often villain combined. Coleridge and
Keats fuse a straightforward appreciation of the traditional figure of
the hero with a complex reworking of his main personality traits, and
in this way they also imbue their heroes with a kind of existential
doubt as to the very supportability of their being. This works on the
level of poetry, history and culture: the literary ideal of the hero is
deconstructed through his increasingly unheroic traumas; the histori-
cal veracity of the hero is questioned through the scepticism with
which the poets treat their sources, whether personal or literary;
finally, the cultural dominance of the heroic persona is unbalanced by
the poets' erosion of his authority, centrality and permanence. Even
as the erotic scenarios of the Delia Cruscans drew attention to the
dynamics of the romance of heterosexuality, so too the harshness
with which Keats and Coleridge treat the heroic ideal disputes the
veracity of the ideal of gender presented by the hero. A model of
masculinity, his textbook conformity in the romantic narrative -
displays of strength, honour, skill, protectiveness, sexual dominance,
for instance - ensures him the rewards of successful masculinity -
respect, leadership, 'the girl'. When Keats and Coleridge find them-
selves unable to uphold a devotion to the protocol of the romantic
hero, then, they also reveal difficulties with the plot required by
masculinity. Coleridge, unlucky in love, addicted to laudanum, and
Keats, emasculated by class3 - both poets' troubles with heroes could
be explained biographically, but as usual biography is only part of the
story; Coleridge and Keats undermine the reliability, the viability, of
the generic as well as the masculine ideal when they redirect the hero
towards failure.
Even as the romance engaged critical attention during the Romantic
period, so did its constituent parts. To be a 'hero' meant something
specific; it required certain behaviour, and necessitated some type of
quest - indeed, that one was palpably questing itself gave the glamour
of the hero. Gillian Beer describes this as the withdrawal of the hero
from society combined with 'a complex prolonged succession of inci-
dents usually without a single climax'. 4 G.R. Levy positions the hero

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70 The Romantic Paradox

as one who, 'unforeseeing, lives through the experience [s] of loss,

wandering, combats with monstrous beings, some kind of transforma-
tion, achievement, a marriage, and again loss'.5 The hero 'differs from
other men in the degree of his powers He awakes admiration
primarily because he has in rich abundance qualities which other men

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have to a much lesser extent', says CM. Bowra, who notes that
eloquence, as well as strength, swiftness, endurance, or resourceful-
ness, is a heroic gift.6 Walter Reed elaborates:

The Romantic hero is not a simple being, but one involved in a set
of relationships both dialectical and dynamic. The hero is first of all
a figure related ... to a metaphysical ontological ground. The hero is
... as an extraordinary person is to the ordinary members of his
society Finally, the Romantic hero is involved in a relationship
to himself, that is, to his own heroic identity. He ... must live up to,
or decline from, an inherited heroic ideal His identity is never
completely fixed but is in the process of evolution or devolution.7

And Lloyd Bishop comments that 'the romantic hero's basic trait ...
is acute self-consciousness'; he is a 'solitary hero' whose quest is
'never-ending', importing a sense of circularity and claustrophobia. 8
The quest, then, is entered on for the betterment of the hero and, ulti-
mately, society, which may but more often may not recognise the
value of its hero until the quest has been successfully completed; it
involves isolation and withdrawal from home, journeys of some kind
(physical, intellectual, emotional, moral), and is often characterised
by continual self-regeneration. During the quest, the hero gains
knowledge but can also lose it, and his quest may be valued by no one
but himself; he is regarded as somehow different, and 'other' - this
may mean he is celebrated but just as often leads to the isolation that
engenders the quest. Importantly, he is introspective; his difference in
Romantic ideology is mental, and his relationship to his society
vexed. He is always awaiting, in search of, self-justification and accep-
tance by his society, but as his quest unfolds he learns the worth of
self-reliance, self-awareness, and fortitude in the face of opposition; he
learns to be a man, and returns to society a verified - tested, found and
made good - leader. The heroic quest itself forms the hero, whose
heroism is only ever potential before the quest's completion. While an
older form of romance insisted on a visible, physical quest, the
Romantic-period quest can be internalised, a mental or emotional
journey through one's own makeup.

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 71

However, as the different critical accounts make clear, the Romantic

hero is an unstable personality, dependent on events, on history, on
expectation, and on generic fidelity. Beer notes a key difference
between the medieval romance and the Romantic period's version(s):
'whereas in the medieval romance the writer is quizzically present,

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commenting, interpreting, offering asides to the reader, in the roman-
tic period the poet seeks to be immersed in the same element as the
imaginative forms he presents' (62). The Romantic romance hero
follows an emotional path laid down according to external generic
principles; he seeks immersion in form and identifies with the form
and content of the world he both sees and half-creates. The allusion is
not incidental, since the creative landscape traversed by the hero - the
poet - is externalised in the form of art, the poem that becomes a map
of the quest undertaken by the hero. The swings from external (genre)
to internal (quest) to external (poem) create the reader's quest; as Beer
says, 'we have to depend entirely on the narrator of the romance: he
remakes the rules of what is possible, what impossible' (8). The success
of our readerly quest for meaning, then, depends on the poet's own
handling of his quest; the forays into an internal landscape are,
perversely, often unsignposted, frustrating our desire for narrative
coherency while also allowing glimpses of a personality in flux. The
formation of Romantic sensibility, the achievement of full heroic
capability, the creation and domination of poetic creativity - these are
truisms of Romantic selfhood, itself an expression of an idealised form
of masculinity. 9 The combination of a turn to an internal landscape,
a reorientation of the quest towards self-illumination, and the solip-
sistic nature of the romance of T creates the instability of the hero
and the circularity of a quest defined by 'a never-ending movement
toward fulfilled vision and self-comprehension, an ever-intensifying
desire for what is desired'. 10
Even, then, as the hero directs his quest inward, seeking the key to
wholeness of self, vision, knowledge, creative maturity, or under-
standing, he is also following the path laid out by cultural norms:
becoming a hero and becoming a man feed into each other. The
romance of selfhood accompanies and mirrors the romance of gender,
and the hero pursues the tracks of genre and gender. Where, then, is
the uncharted wilderness the hero traditionally encounters? If in both
literary and cultural terms the journey is always already mapped, how
can the hero achieve the independent personality that guarantees his
heroism - how does he demonstrate his specialness? How can he ever
experience isolation? This central paradox in the development of

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72 The Romantic Paradox

heroic identity is routinely ignored by the questing hero, who must

maintain the unique nature of his quest or risk his heroism altogether.
But its presence is endemic to the failed heroes written by Coleridge
and Keats; they illustrate the impossibility of ever attaining full heroic
status by offering, repeatedly, inadequate heroes on self-defeating

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quests. Whether conducting the reader through the self-immersion of
the conversation poems, as Coleridge does, or directing the reader's
attention to the destruction of the scenario he has spent stanzas creat-
ing, as Keats does, both poets construct romances saturated with
imbalance and loss. The hero's orderly path from youth and inexperi-
ence to full maturity and manhood is fragmented and disrupted;
while it may be true that, as Reed asserts, the hero is 'an ideal struc-
ture of the Romantic imagination' (33), for Coleridge and Keats that
ideal remains immaterial, insubstantial, and unable to compete with
the debased and unstructured heroes on which they concentrate. And
for each poet, violence enters as something experienced by or done to
the hero that emblematises his failure: for Coleridge, the concentra-
tion on the self and concomitant loss of self that pervades the
conversation poems effectively vitiates both heroic wholeness and the
romance of T; for Keats, more securely positioned as detached narra-
tor, the actual physical violence and threats inflicted on his heroes
lead to similar results. The bursting ardours of the heroic soul' (Bowra
131) become, quite literally, lethal.
The quest, then, takes place internally, for Keats as well as
Coleridge; Keats's heroes, too, while more familiar in their dress and
speech, traverse emotional landscapes. While appearing ever-new, the
quest treacherously offers each candidate the customary and the old;
as Ross puts it, 'the Romantic poet quests for the originating self
within the self only to discover ... relation or ratio, only to discover
his indebtedness to the world of his forefathers in making him capable
of seeming to possess himself (27). n As poets, the 'Romantics'
quested for self-expression, for the ability to remake the world of Self
and Art, for the appreciation that would make them legislators of the
world, heroes of culture. In Ross's terms, this is doomed to failure
because of the poets' inability to recognise that their novel approach
is 'predetermined by the nature of the historical changes that envel-
ope and transform the poetic vocation itself (29). In other words, in
trying to renew their culture, they fail to see that they are products of
it, and that culture inevitably renews itself. Fatalistic as this viewpoint
may be, Ross's description of Romantic entrappedness resonates within
the poetry, for there we find exactly the pre-determined, ineffectual,

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 73

blinkered quests he observes. If romance 'expresses the lost or repressed

emotional forces of the imagination', and if poets 'sought to release'
them through art (Beer 59-60), then it seems significant that so much
about the romance during the Romantic period rests on disorder and
both physical and metaphorical violence. Unrest, dissatisfaction, an

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uneasy embracing of the power of heroism combined with uncomfort-
able inklings of its hollowness and unhappy encounters with its
banalities - these, more than triumph, more than victory, much more
than a celebratory advance towards manliness, inform the portrayals of
heroes in Coleridge and Keats, and indicate a little-noticed use of the
romance for Romantic poets: to allow them to voice, however covertly
or unconsciously, suspicions that romantic heroism had been infil-
trated by cultural complacency and unthinking repetition. The
association of masculinity and heroism is unmasked and its villainy
exposed when Coleridge rigs his own contests and Keats allows
nothing to stand between his heroes and their destruction.

En/gaging the hero: Coleridge

In The Current of Romantic Passion, Jeffrey Robinson frames the

Romantic confessional poem in romance terms: 'autobiographical
writing ... concretizes the notion of an essential self, fundamentally
not socially disruptive and not defined through its political relations.
That self is confirmed, rescued into coherence by benign interventions
from nature ... \ 1 2 Implicitly, Robinson casts the Self as heroine-like,
awaiting rescue by a protective, heroic Nature, even as he maintains
the femininity of knightly nature - it is 'benign', and 'surrounds the
self in a stream, or a cloak ... of language' (74). Bisexual Nature is both
mother and father to the Self - it both protects and enables, while the
passive Self accepts its ministrations. However, the Self also uses its
own story, autobiography, to confirm its boundaries as a Self, inde-
pendent of any Other; Nature is a corollary to this initial authorising
action. This brings us back to the picture of the heroic T, the 'concre-
tised' Subject who tells his own story. Like Nature, this T displays
contradictory characteristics: it is both Self-sufficient and in need of
rescue. The fractures apparent in Robinson's notion of the 'essential
self underscore the fictionality of the quest undertaken by Coleridge
in his conversation poems; autobiographical, philosophical, self-
consciously poetical, as a group they follow a quest chronology
surprisingly unfulfilling, the outcome of which dissipates the essential
Self in favour of a voice mediated through social disruption, political

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74 The Romantic Paradox

relations, and a romantic fixation on Nature that confirms not coher-

ence but fragmentation. The poems as a collection constitute a quest
narrative that follows, roughly and haltingly, the prototypical hero's
progress through a romance landscape; in his internalised quest-
romance, however, Coleridge is both the hero and the saboteur of his

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own journey. In merging hero and villain in the person of the speak-
ing T, Coleridge creates a hero-figure repeatedly compelled to traverse
a metaphorical romance landscape: each poem functions as a step
along the way. And yet the multiple failures and pullings-back, the
continual turn to a higher authority, the manifested inability to
control and direct his own movements represent recurring assaults
against the coherence of the Self and the establishment of an
autonomous heroic identity. Coleridge accepts an initial designation
as hero; he sets out on a quest to find and maintain the parameters of
a fully independent - a masculine - T, and he performs segments of
the heroic script in each poem, but in each a crucial moment of
evasion destabilises his heroic identity. Coleridge's conversation
poems show his familiarity with the language of the coherent Self, and
his doubt at its authenticity: in his ultimate refusal to become fully
heroic we read his disenchantment with its ideals.
Anne Mellor describes the male poet in 'Kubla Khan' as 'a pariah
about to be exorcised from the human community'; 13 'Kubla Khan',
of course, stands as Coleridge's most extremely internalised poetic
landscape, from its purported provenance in a dream to its common
interpretation as a poem about poetic creativity. For Coleridge,
romance was resolutely within: 'the romance expressed a world perma-
nently within all men: the world of the imagination and of dream'
(Beer 7). Turning the romance inward, Coleridge associated it with
creativity and the poetic T, the artist who draws on imagination to
colour reality, a technique that has seduced readers into understand-
ing the poetic T as the fully physical T: 'Coleridge was convinced he
had earned the prophet's role. Perhaps nowhere else is his moral and
esthetic self-deception so vividly illustrated as in the pious conclu-
sions to Ode to the Departing Year and Fears in Solitude'.,14 Two heroic
traits have emerged, one derived from poetry, the other assigned to
life: withdrawal from society, and special knowledge indicating
unique powers. When we read that 'the Romantics are seeking the ...
integration of the psyche' 15 it is not too difficult to associate this with
a Coleridgean quest for poetic wholeness, the conjoining of imagina-
tion and Self - the very pairing he sets up again and again in the
conversation poems, only to derail it at the last moment. Similarly,

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 75

Coleridge's 'belie[f]' in Nature's 'power to heal, guide, and inspire', 16

evident most particularly in The Eolian Harp' and This Lime-Tree
Bower my Prison', suggests that union with Nature is twinned with
psychic integration as the object of his quest, but this, too, he sabo-
tages. It is a common view of Coleridge that, in life as in poetry, his

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desires and his abilities to achieve those desires did not match, and
that his art, in its fits and starts, reflects his life;17 that the terminol-
ogy employed so often invokes the romance is a unremarked measure
of the consistency of his approach to both. In reading the conversa-
tion poems as a quest-narrative, however, we can begin to glimpse a
poet who actively used genre to reflect meaning, whose simultaneous
identification with and manipulations of the heroic persona indicates
a knowing involvement with romance 18 that allows him to gesture
towards a personal and poetic differance, and to shy away from it.
In his conversation poems, then, Coleridge appears as composite of
the types of hero described by Peter Thorslev: he is a Child of Nature
in his displays of sentiment and naivete, his closeness to nature and
his unworldly generosity; he is a Man of Feeling in his conspicuous
benevolence, class position, education, physical frailty19 and excessive
sensibility; he is even part Gloomy Egoist in his 'cultivation of ...
melancholy' and attraction to the Gothic. 20 In these guises he explores
the limits of the hero, and through him the limits of the social ideal of
manhood; between 1795 and 1798 he journeys from home and hearth,
to a version of the outside world, to prison, and back home again, to
rest, finally, outside himself in a hero-less realm of self-designated
'conversation' (The Nightingale. A Conversation Poem'). Within each
poem Coleridge follows a route from perplexity through to insight,
and exits via deflation; this matrix is mirrored in the framework estab-
lished by the six poems, which begin at 'home', progress through
imprisonment, and end with the exchange of the heroic persona for
that of the sidelined 'bard', a mere narrator. The romance landscape
charted imaginatively by Coleridge offers the questing speaker a
variety of mental adventures, from which he moves toward a develop-
ment and growth that he is never able to sustain. In other words, in
these poems Coleridge conducts a conversation with himself on, not
the desirability, but the viability, of the heroic ideal; his conclusion is
implicit in the arc of failure described by the sequence.
For instance, in The Eolian Harp' (1795) the hero comes to the real-
isation that he must leave home and heroine behind and begin his
adventures, the romance hero's standard impetus. The poet Coleridge
is on his honeymoon; the speaker is situated domestically beside 'our

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76 The Romantic Paradox

cot', the idealised domestic paradise requisite to a love union. 21

Himself on the brink of an idealised journey, Coleridge enlists Sara as
his heroine, although the epithet 'pensive' already suggests the
'tension between the ideal role that Coleridge required her to play,
and his sense that she was somehow less than adequate to that role'

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(Everest 62). However, at this point 'pensive' Sara merely signals her
suitability; she is in accord with the 'saddening' clouds, and in tune
with the 'soothing sweet[ness]' of the 'o'ergrown' cot (1, 7, 2, 3). 22 The
opening lines establish a home that is almost cloying and unmistak-
ably feminised; in addition, its odd combination of life (all those
covering flowers and vines) and non-life (the hushed, 'stilly', silent
world23) embeds a supernatural otherworldliness that resonates with
romance. The turn to the 'lute', instrument of bards, further conveys
the romantic feel. Within the second stanza the speaker draws three
comparisons centred on the harp, and each corresponds to an attempt
at creative escape from the overgrown cot. The first, concentrating on
the sensual aspects of the harp's music, can go no further than a
scenario suggested by the honeymoon cottage itself: the harp is
'caressed' by the breeze, and responds Tike some coy maid half-yield-
ing to her lover' (14, 15).24 It provides an imagery springboard,
however, to the second comparison, rendered in the language of the
romance and the fairy tale; here, the harp's song becomes a 'soft float-
ing witchery of sound/ [Such] as twilight Elfins make' (20-1). And as
if only romance can lead to philosophy, the third comparison theo-
rises on 'the one life within us and abroad' (26). At this point, sound
has become visionary, 'a light in sound' (28), and the speaker finds
himself transported, separated in place and time from the cot and Sara.
In this first attempt at leaving the home, the speaker gets no further
than a mysterious suspended 'noon'. The present-tense verbs
('stretch', 'behold', 'muse', 'traverse') establish that the speaker
neither remembers a past experience nor forecasts a future one. This
initial foray, however, allows him to experience an intellectual burst.
His famous rhetorical question represents a station achieved in his
quest: 'And what if all of animated nature/ Be but organic harps
diversely framed,/ That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps/
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,/ At once the Soul of each, and
God of All?' (44-8). At this point Coleridge derails his line of thought
by turning back to Sara and interpreting her 'serious eye' as a 'reproof
(49). While, as Stephen Bygrave summarises, most critics have thrown
the blame for Coleridge's thump back to earth onto Sara, it is impor-
tant to see that Coleridge himself creates the reproof; as Bygrave

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 77

notes, 'Coleridge enjoins on himself finally the silence of the first

section'. 25 The line reads 'But thy more serious eye a mild reproof/
Darts' (49-50), indicating not that in her eye darts a reproof, but rather
that Coleridge sees her habitual seriousness (remember her opening
pensiveness) as a reproof. In other words, Coleridge reproves himself,

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using Sara's serious eye as his tool, and in doing so he disables his own
flight, aborts his own quest. From here on he deprecates his insight as
'bubbles' from an 'unregenerate mind' (56, 55), and then prostrates
himself before God as 'a sinful and most miserable man' (62). The
poem thus ends where it had begun, a closed circle focused on home.
Within the poem's structure the speaker has made a bid for freedom,
but he has sabotaged his own chances; as the first poem in the quest
sequence, 'Harp' sets the scene for the breakdown of the heroic ideal
and the endemic failure of the quest. The internal destruction of
consistency that informs 'Harp' fans outward to characterise the
sequence as a whole (Everest 208-9).
While in 'Harp' the speaker-hero aborts his journey, leaving home
only to return to it, in 'Reflections on Having Left a Place of
Retirement' (1795 or 1796) he has succeeded in stage one: home is
now in the past, a source for memories, and the speaker attempts to
engage in 'the bloodless fight' (61). However, the double-placement
experimented with in 'Harp', where the T located himself simultane-
ously at both the cot and the hill, continues, as despite having left the
place of retirement, the speaker devotes 42 lines to recreating his expe-
rience there. Again, he strives for subjectivity at the same time as he
inscribes his objectified self: the overgrown cot is now Tow' and
'twin'd' with jasmine, 26 and, moreover, is 'eyed' and 'gazed' at by a
'wealthy son of commerce' (16, 11). As Everest argues, 'the philo-
sophical passages in the poetry are at once statements of belief, and
attempts to register emotions at a high pitch, that is to say, they are
expressive of feeling' (210, Everest's emphasis). The feeling engendered
by being overlooked in his domestic idyll provokes the speaker to
action, still in memory, but again expressive of departure: as in 'Harp',
he leaves the cot to climb, this time to 'reach the top' (28; in 'Harp' he
could only make 'the midway slope' [ 34]). Gaining the prospect view
not only dismisses the son of commerce and his authority, it estab-
lishes the speaker in a position of validated masculinity, an ideal
stance of heroic significance.27 The vista opens images to the speaker
that almost allow him to identify with God - the long dash follows
nine lines of breathless description 28 that culminate with the exclam-
atory 'It seemed like Omnipresence!' (38). Displacing his active

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78 The Romantic Paradox

presence through the impersonal noun 'it' begins the process of

retreat: first, however, the speaker uses the authority gained from the
prospect to 'quit' the 'quiet dell! Dear cot, and mount sublime!' (44,
43). This is the necessary first step on the quest, although it is
conveyed negatively ('constrained', 44), and leads to the declaration

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of heroic duty: T therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand,/ Active
and firm, to fight the bloodless fight/ Of science, freedom, and the
truth in Christ' (60-2). But the poem's final stanza, with its fragmen-
tary, incoherent 'fond wishes', is unconvincing; the cot is both
dismissed and constantly invoked, and the tone of the final four lines
seems more desperate than contented: 'And I shall sigh fond wishes -
sweet abode!/ Ah! - had none greater! And that all had such!/ It might
be so - but the time is not yet./ Speed it, O Father! Let thy kingdom
come!' (68-71). Clearly, while the speaker has succeeded in beginning
his quest, he is not fully persuaded of its value. As a pair, 'Harp' and
'Reflections' waver between asserting the need to leave the domestic
space and arguing for its primacy. Even as the speaker-hero begins his
quest, he longs for its conclusion.
The next two poems, This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison' (1797) and
'Frost at Midnight' (1798), see the speaker-hero imprisoned, forced
back into retirement and imposed immobility. In the romance, the
hero's imprisonment is usually used for reflection, regeneration and
renewal; he proves his versatility and ingenuity through his escape,
and rededicates himself to his quest and its ideals. In 'Lime-Tree', the
speaker-hero ostensibly achieves a peace and understanding by the
poem's end that makes up for, even justifies, the imprisonment itself.
But 'Lime-Tree' is also the first poem of the sequence wherein the
speaker-hero attempts the integration of the T that is the goal of his
quest. As Reed points out, The Romantic hero is frequently jealous of
his selfhood An interesting consequence of this jealous defense of
selfhood is the tendency of the heroic character to free himself from
the confines of plot' (16). The romance plot requires the imprison-
ment of the hero, as I noted above, but in 'Lime-Tree' the speaker
simultaneously emphasises the frivolity of the injury that imprisons
him - he 'met with an accident, which disabled him from walking' 29
- and denies the imprisonment altogether, not only accompanying
his friends on their walk in his imagination, but also directing and
controlling it. The walk they actually take is not the one the speaker
is interested in; he instead creates for them 'that still roaring dell, of
which I told' (9) and from this point their walk is his walk, conveyed
in the same present tense that facilitated the speaker's doubled self-

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 79

placement in the first two poems. Ignoring his imprisonment, the

speaker devises a hero-proxy in 'gentle-hearted Charles' whose City
toil resembles the 'bloodless fight' of 'Reflections' and foreshadows
Coleridge's boyhood vision in 'Frost at Midnight'. Charles sees with
the speaker's eyes and feels the speaker's exultation at once again

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achieving the prospect view. The incantatory rhythm of lines 32-7
further establishes the idea of the speaker's presence, but the lines also
take on the darker tinge of the romance enchanter:

Ah! Slowly sink

Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple-hearted flowers! Richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue ocean!

The speaker-hero in 'Lime-Tree' is a more compromised figure - less

passive, but also less pure.
That he parlays his union with Charles - temporary escape - into an
acceptance of his prison means that even as Coleridge empowers his
hero through a paradoxical denial of heroic destiny, exchanging the
weakness of passivity for a plot-enlarging defection from prison, he
collapses back into heroic failure at the climactic moment. Coleridge
reverses this segment of the heroic quest-narrative, securing his hero
even more closely in prison at the poem's end and ensuring that this
develops from the hero's imaginative denial of imprisonment at the
poem's start. The result is stasis: the speaker comes to accept his
imprisonment as a good thing because of the visions he has used to
escape it, and the continuation of the quest is again postponed.
Indeed, in 'Lime-Tree' the speaker deserts subjectivity altogether in
favour of an ending emphasis on Charles, the proxy, whose under-
standing that 'no sound is dissonant which tells of Life' (76) concludes
the poem. 30 Unwilling, now, to leave his prison, the speaker-hero
ejects the very agency he has spent the bulk of the poem establishing:
the union of Self with Nature through vision dwindles into the
comfortably 'soothing' surroundings of the bower. This poem, with its
reversals, contradictions, and retreats, signals the poet's weakening
resolve to complete the poetic quest. It colours the sequence with a
defeatism that reflects more on the nature of heroic action - after all,
why should he leave the bower? - than on the ramifications of the
speaker's choices.

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80 The Romantic Paradox

This is adumbrated in 'Frost at Midnight', where again the hero

speaks, apparently, from prison: this time a self-imposed one, where
domestic duties function as the chain. 31 Paired as it is with 'Lime-
Tree', the suspicion rises that this poem dramatises the situation of a
hero who has accepted his lack of mobility, to whom imprisonment

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does not signify limitation. Even as the quest has always been inter-
nalised, this poem is itself internal, wrapped in layers of quiet,
stillness, darkness and meditation. Once again, there is incantation:
'Sea, hill, and wood,/ This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,/
With all the numberless goings on of life/ Inaudible as dreams!'
(10-13). The speaker seems settled in reflection: is this, then, the
poem wherein prison functions to allow for heroic rejuvenation?
Everest reads the turn to Hartley's future in stanza 3 as symbolic of the
poet's new-found capacity for imagination: 'Coleridge will realise his
own lost potential in the development of his son's consciousness'
(267). The key, however, is the loss that Hartley embodies, rather than
the futurity; the trajectory of the poem institutes the reality of failure
and of retreat to an idealised vision of Hartley's childhood as a correc-
tive to the speaker's own. The speaker-hero, instead of finding solace
and strength in his memories, re-images his past as composed of the
same layers of stillness and imprisonment he now experiences:
describing the fire's grate as 'the bars' (25), he moves further back into
memory, again situating his speaking self as simultaneously 'here' - in
his cottage at midnight - and 'there' - in his childhood school - and
beyond to another 'there' - his 'sweet birth-place' (28). 'Frost' allows
for no form of escape, however; the memories are set down in the past
tense, and the effect of the stanza is of the weakening of heroic ambi-
tion and the loss of autonomy and maturity. By continuing to focus
on 'deep calm' and the 'vacancies/ And momentary pauses of ...
thought' (45, 46-7), and linking these with further images of himself
as 'pent' (52) in contrast to his son's freedom to 'wander like a breeze'
(54), the speaker constructs himself as of the past, static, and hence
capable only of 'realising his lost potential' - that is, realising he has
lost his potential - in his son. As with his friends' walk in 'Lime-Tree',
Coleridge maps out Hartley's future, rather than his own, while the
benediction that closes the poem can be viewed either as, in heroic
terms, merely the weakened gesture of a speaker drained of agency by
the 'secret ministry of frost' and the cocooning effect of silence and
quiet (72-4); 32 or, perhaps, as the poet's clue that concentration on
the 'bloodless fight' is itself imprisoning. Certainly, the restrained
mood of 'Frost', its embracing of the domestic space, undermine the

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 81

masculine imperative to break free of such fetters and seek adventures.

The quest continues, but its parameters are changing; as the speaker
moves deeper into himself, as he reaches turning-points and draws
conclusions, his dedication to the heroic ideal itself transforms from a
self-focused desire for autonomy and independence to a more diffused

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concentration on the outer landscape.
The final pairing of 'Fears in Solitude' and The Nightingale' (both
1798) complete a cycle of questing and retreat; the melancholy and
doubt pervading 'Fears' and the unfocused plot of 'Nightingale'
shadow a comprehensive change of identity for the speaker, and with
it a final renunciation /rejection/loss of the heroic role. The speaker's
exchange of the 'mount sublime' for a 'green and silent spot, amid the
hills,/ A small and silent dell' ('Fears', 1-2), via the prisons of the
bower and the home, show a self-conscious desire not for action, but
for withdrawal. The 'quiet spirit-healing nook' (12) 33 shelters a
speaker who now chooses the inactive role of prophet or seer; his
apocalyptic tone emphasises the drama of his 'fears', a self-consciously
theatrical position that maintains the need for action but masks the
inability to act. The dialectical tensions in which the romantic hero
is involved ... produces ... a tenuous equilibrium which breaks down
eventually, and leads either to the hero's self-destruction or to a para-
lysis of the will or heroic resolve' (Bishop 18). If 'Lime-Tree' and 'Frost'
allowed for a 'tenuous equilibrium' in which the speaker-hero could
juggle his heroic and anti-heroic impulses, 'Fears' marks a 'paralysis of
the will' to act and the perversion of the quest into a kind of inquest
on the state of England. Symbolism loses its force: 'dainty terms ... /
Which we trundle smoothly o'er our tongues/ Like mere abstractions,
empty sounds to which/ We join no feeling and attach no form!' (113,
114-16). Talismans lose their meaning: 'the Book of Life is made/ A
superstitious instrument' (70-1). But worst of all, the heroic voice
itself loses its depth; after 197 lines of doom, the speaker pulls back,
first to doubt and then to a diminishment of the speaking self to a
'child' of his country rather than its saviour:

May my fears,
My filial fears, be vain! And may the vaunts
And menace of the vengeful enemy
Pass like the gust, that roared and died away
In the distant tree: which heard, and only heard
In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass.
(197-202, emphasis added)

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82 The Romantic Paradox

Having depleted his warnings of their fervour, the speaker then

returns anticlimactically to his dell, only to find that he must leave it.
'Homeward I wind my way' (210); the 'burst of prospect' (215) he
happens on enlivens the mind but marks mainly his 'lowly cottage',
while it is the 'green and silent dell' that remains in his thoughts (225,

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228). 'Fears' ends calmly, quietly, contentedly, but its destination is
little different than that the speaker started from in 'Harp': through
five poems, each with its own internal circularity, the speaker can
only rotate around a point of silence and inaction. The overall trajec-
tory of the poems traces an heroic pathway, but the speaker himself
cannot advance; each new attempt sees the same eventual failure.
The sequence concludes, then, with the one poem officially desig-
nated 'A Conversation Poem', and yet the speaker's conversants are
either absent or incapable, themselves, of speech (the nightingales,
the 'dear babe'). This poem has a strong flavour of benediction, and its
final repeated 'farewells' recall the reversed narrative Coleridge plotted
in 'Lime-Tree': the quest traditionally concludes with a homecoming,
not a leave-taking. Again, the speaker creates a world of negatives, of
silence: 'No cloud, no relique of the sunken day/ Distinguishes the
West, no long thin slip/ Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues/
/ All is still' (1-3, 7). Everest says that a 'connective consciousness,
a distinctive property of all the conversation poems, is a central theme
of The Nightingale' (281), but the poem itself insists on detachment
and mystery: the nightingale's song, the deserted castle, the gentle
Maid. In 'Nightingale' the speaker forsakes his own story for the
conventionally romantic tale of a lord and a maid - although the lord
is absent and the maid is isolated. The abrupt interjection of romance
and its immediate emptying, the hollow Gothicism of stanzas 3 and
4, affirm not the resolution of a quest, the completion of a narrative,
or even a 'connective consciousness', but a disjoining, an unravelling
of romantic convention and the rejection of romantic meaning.
The melancholy and self-doubt that infused the earlier poems is
here converted to a dreamy passage from image to image; as Everest
notes, 'Nightingale' is 'rather too discursive There is a lack of
direction in the development of the poem, a rambling quality' (282,
283). Everest relates this to the plot's 'serenity' (283), but in romance
terms it also signals a loss of focus, a literal Tack of direction' in the
quest for a unified consciousness. Coleridge's speaker-hero no longer
recognises his journey, and instead of resolving his own narrative
begins to tell someone else's story at just the point in the poem where
his efforts to detach the nightingale from melancholy are floundering:

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 83

having protested this traditional association for 39 lines, he moves to

a stanza seemingly intent on substituting the 'different lore' that
'Nature's sweet voices [are] always full of love/ And joyance!' (41-2).
The difficulty is that the only example the speaker can devise contra-
dicts this peaceful claim:

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Tis the merry Nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul
Of all its music!
(43-9, emphasis added)

The speaker-hero's own fears of the shortness of the night (and the
ending of the quest?) infiltrate the nightingale's loving and joyous
song; it is hard to see merriment in the rather desperate bird the
speaker conjures, his love-chant at risk of being cut off. Ironically,
this is just what the speaker does to his own mixed image, ending
the stanza mid-line and beginning the next with the conjunction
'and', illogical in light of the, at best, tangential connection
between images: 34 'And I know a grove/ Of large extent, hard by a
castle huge,/ Which the great lord inhabits not' (49-51). 35 The
speaker's transformation into storyteller heralds his final embrace of
the domestic and the enclosed in the last stanza, and his designa-
tion of his quest as 'a father's tale' (106). For the speaker, the
nightingale comes to symbolise others' songs; by exchanging his
for, say, the maid's, he effectively pre-empts his quest, an abrupt
termination that belies the efforts of continual re-arming each
poem has represented. For the poet, the nightingale works to
embody the speaker's inability to tell his tale: he utilises a symbol
traditionally associated both with silence (the cut tongue of
Philomel) and with violence (the tale of rape it sings). The poet also
reappropriates a familiar feminine symbol and resexes it (the
nightingale is always 'he' in the poem), as he does with the moon,
here a symbol of a boy-baby's unearthly silent laughter and the
'father's tale' (106). In so doing, Coleridge does not merely co-opt
the feminine; he also exposes his speaker's confusion and perplex-
ity. The hero now chooses as his closing trophy one of the most
familiar literary symbols of male villainy.

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84 The Romantic Paradox

Throughout this sequence of poems, Coleridge constructs a hero-

persona whose continual efforts to establish a viable Self and pursue a
viable quest are as continually stymied. Instead of achieving psychic
unity, the speaker suffers psychic disintegration, constructing a series
of 'conversations' with no one: his interlocutors are never more than

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poetic constructs, at best functioning only as silent listeners to poetic
monologues. By identifying his speaker with the hero, by ensuring
that the six poems, broken down into three pairs, reconstruct a species
of quest, Coleridge calls into question the validity of the quest-narra-
tive itself. His speaker's repeated attempts to leave home, to escape
prison, and to return home are shadowed by uncanny refusals, so that
the stages of the quest are both evident and rewritten in each poem.
As I have suggested, in part this allows Coleridge to reconfigure the
strictures of heroism. The final emphasis on the 'father's tale' in
'Nightingale' hints at the alternative storyline the poems put forth:
the substitution of the domestic for the heroic, which troubles the
speaker but which the poet continually reinscribes. Coleridge's poetic
intervention in the coherency of the heroic quest recalls the 'displace-
ment' Stephen Bygraves sees as endemic to the conversation poems:
'the effects of the poems' egotism is to expose the reader to the doubts
concerning and contiguous to egotism which animate their process'
(133). 'Romantic egotism' is another formulation for dominant
masculinity that remakes the world in its own image (the nightingale
becomes a male symbol, for instance), and the relation to the ideal
heroic type is self-evident: the hero dominates the telling of his own
tale. Coleridge, attracted to and repelled by the pre-eminence of the
hero, sets him on his quest and systematically sabotages his efforts to
follow it. The violence is figurative, but instructive, for in disallowing
heroic triumph, Coleridge destroys the viability of heroic subjectivity.
He interacts with genre, pulls out a useful part, and exposes its shal-
lowness. Bishop describes the 'hermeneutic distance' created in the
first-person heroic narrative: 'when the romantic hero tells his own
story in the first person, it is often framed by an authorial, editorial,
or other narrative point of view' (17). By investing his heroic quest so
overtly with doubt, melancholy, and failure, Coleridge withers the
heroic ideal.

Detumescence: Keats

In his famous study The Hoodwinking of Madeline, Jack Stillinger argues

that, having completed Endymion,36 Keats feels a 'growing dissatisfac-

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 85

tion with romance', and that this dissatisfaction finds expression 'in a
tremendous vision of anti-romantic "truth"' coupled with a turn from
'detested moods' to 'new Romance'. 37 Reading 'new Romance' as 'a
new Romance', Stillinger turns to what he calls 'Keats's last large
poetic failure, Isabella' and attempts its recuperation as 'a more

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complex poem than critics generally allow' (31).38 Stillinger's account
resonates with preconceptions about the romance: that it is opposed
to 'truth', the proper aim of poetry; that it struggles with complexity;
that it is identifiable as text - 'a romance' - rather than genre -
'romance'. Stillinger wants to prove that Keats had something more
advanced in mind than a 'simple' romance, and in this way he betrays
his critical prejudice against a genre frequently considered not
complex enough for a mature poet to write seriously. However, Keats's
phrase is clear: he searches for comfort in 'new Romance', and thereby
suggests a desire to write the genre anew, to investigate its precepts
and invest its storyline with novelty, what Marjorie Levinson calls the
'subversion of ... authoritarian values', 'elaborately estranged from
their own materials and procedures'. 39 In other words, from Isabella
onwards Keats subverts and rearranges old Romance. Rather than
rejecting the genre, Keats reappropriates it, and more specifically he
redraws the character of the romantic hero, creating scenarios in
which the limits of heroic endeavour are recognised, tested, and
found wanting. Levinson writes that Keats 'signifies his alienation
from his materia poetica' (15, Levinson's emphasis); as with her use of
'authoritarian', she gestures toward the authorly task of inscription, of
signification: Keats troubles 'author-itarian values' of genre as derived
from authors' use of genre, and he sign-ifies his rewrites through genre
itself. Despite Stillinger's insistence on 'the inadequacies of romance'
(32) and his assertion that this 'ineffectual and out of date' form is
'banished' from Keats's oeuvre - Though he sometimes subsequently
call his poems "romances" ... Keats never again wholeheartedly
embraces the idea of romance' (33, Stillinger's emphasis) - Keats priv-
ileges exactly 'new Romance' in his 1820 volume. Stillinger,
concerned with the bad reputation of romance as, essentially, trivial,
immature, artistically Tow', and feminising, attempts to regenre
Lamia, Isabella, and The Eve of St. Agnes as 'not-romances', elevated in
'idea' if not in plot. And yet, what is significant is not, of course,
Keats's 'banishing' of romance, but his reconsideration of romantic
thematics, which he had supported in Endymion, and his replotting of
the quest-narrative with its new and disimproved hero.
Coleridge turns his unease inward; he asks his Self to suffer, and in

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86 The Romantic Paradox

this way plots the hero's downfall through the failure of subjectivity.
Keats is more circumspect: he targets conventional romance heroes,
all of whom quest for love and erotic fulfilment. Where and how they
love, and the consequences, are the focus of Keats's new Romance;
his apparent devotion to narratives of love's potential masks his

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'alienation' from their requirements, and from his source material.
His approach to Boccaccio, or Chaucer, or Burton, or Chartier is
creative, 'supplemental' in Levinson's terminology: 'specifically func-
tional and overdetermined interferences with the romance narrative'
(131), wherein the romance is relied on and destroyed simultane-
ously, the hero embodied and deconstructed simultaneously. Reed
remarks that 'the Romantic hero usually experiences the evolution of
his heroic substance or else its erosion' (30), but Keats's new Romance
ignores such binaries, and instead concentrates on poeticising failure
and inadequacy, disguised as romance and heroism. Like Coleridge,
Keats is interested in the expectations attendant on the hero, and he
interrogates the heroic ideal with his portrayals of the cunning and
wily Porphyro, naive Lorenzo, possessive Lycius, and bitter Knight-at-
arms, whose first appearance (as a 'wretched wight') in the Indicator
of May 1820 shadows and to a certain extent provides the template
for the other three. None fulfil heroic duty, yet all are recognisable as
romance heroes. If, as Hermann Fischer affirms, the romance hero
experiences 'a human fate in such a way that the reader can identify
with it', 40 then he begins to function on the level of an example, and
his connection to a kind of ideal behaviour - masculinity - is again
suggested. Like Coleridge, Keats explores the idea of the hero as an
exemplar and, in subjecting him to varying forms of violence, signals
his dissatisfaction with its parameters. The common argument that
Keats inhabits the feminine subject-position, rehearsed from the
earliest accusations of 'effeminacy' to contemporary critical discus-
sions of what Mellor calls his 'ideological cross-dressing'41 does not,
however, fully explain Keats's complex position; instead, it is impor-
tant to see Keats's poetical approach not as masking a perennial lack
of confidence, or dramatising an immature or 'regressive' (Stillinger
37) style, or signifying an anxious establishment of 'a space where the
poet can preserve a recognisable masculinity' (Mellor 181), but as the
technique of a poet who manipulates images of genre and, through
this, of gender. Keats challenges the viability of the very masculinity
he has been seen, variously, to champion or to yearn for; he poeti-
cises an uncomfortable, perhaps unacknowledged awareness of its
weaknesses.

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 87

In this way he, like Coleridge, takes on the mantle of differance that
he has been so often denigrated or excused for embodying. This
suggests a poet skilful enough to use genre rather than being over-
whelmed by it. Keats's well-known axiom that Poetry 'should strike
the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear

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almost as Remembrance If Poetry comes not as naturally as the
Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all' 42 indicates his feeling
that poetry should reflect the natural processes of budding and
memory; it should, therefore, reflect and confirm nature in its content
and structure as well as its composition. What, then, of the denatured
hero? It is not what happens to him that is disruptive of the natural
skein of experience, but rather who he is, an embodiment of heroic
masculinity constantly stymied by his own creator. It is common to
read death or injury in literary texts as punishment for a character's
innate wrongness and offence against the moral values of the world
the text reflects or creates. Keats, says Richard Woodhouse in 1819,
asserts that 'he does not want ladies to read his poetry: that he writes
for men' (Spencer Hill 60); Stillinger notes that Keats 'never lost touch
with reality' (93). What this somewhat unfair yoking of responses to
the romances brings out is the intriguing notion that the romances
can be seen as instructional, as cautionary tales on the psychological
inadequacies of heroic masculinity. Each hero is shepherded to his
individual doom by a narrator more or less blithe and detached, who
tells the tale, offers critique, but does not get involved. 43 This aloof
narrator provokes an understanding of the romances as fables, and of
the poet as social commentator. Keats rewrites his heroes to convey
something to his (male) readers; he injures, even kills off romantic
masculinity once it has been sexualised. He pushes it away into alle-
gory, or he drains it. What has been labelled effeminacy, immaturity,
or a male poet's version of feminine Romanticism acts, instead, as a
narrative of conviction, questioning gender: like Coleridge, Keats
exposes the weaknesses of the heroic ideal. His heroes, enervated,
either cannot survive their own stories, or find their futures consumed
wholesale, a fate intimated in Dorothy van Ghent's study Keats: The
Myth of the Hero.44 In associating Keats's heroes with mythic season-
gods, she underwrites his romances with archetype; the romances
themselves offer the archetype of gender and the deconstruction of
the masculine hero altogether. Keats trades the adolescent moonings
of Endymion for the maturity of the unromance and its reflections on
the heroic ideal. Hazlitt's critique of Keats's 'deficiency [of] masculine
energy of style ... [and] want of strength and substance' (1822;

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88 The Romantic Paradox

Spencer Hill 48) unwittingly points to the crux of the 1820 romances:
his poetry follows a strategy of evasion and rejection of standard
forms of heroic masculinity.
'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' condenses Keats's discomfort with heroic
values into 48 lines; this poem outlines the parameters of his tech-

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nique that he will explore more fully in the 1820 volume. The poem's
competing versions agree on the violence done to the Knight/wight,
however, and concur as well in the suggestion that the Knight/wight
has been less than honourable in his approaches to the Dame. 45 The
popular readings of the poem - that it describes the fatal attraction of
a wanton woman, or of Poetry, or of the Imagination 46 - all overlook
the main thrust: 'Dame' sketches out a romance plot, centring partic-
ularly on the hero's 'disastrous mistake'. Bowra links this with the
'disastrous choice', and says of the 'mistake' that it figures 'a decision
... made wrongly through some miscalculation or defect of character.
The result is always some catastrophe which might otherwise have
been averted' (122). The Knight/wight both proves his hero-status and
compromises his heroic value when he 'control[s] ; and bind[s]' the
Dame 'with lovely chains', enacting the 'thematics of containment'
that Karen Swann sees as endemic to the romance. 47 In fact, the
Knight/wight behaves in a decidedly unchivalrous manner, forgetting
his pledge to protect women and instead giving in to his own percep-
tion of the Dame as Tight' and 'wild' and therefore sexually
available.48 Perhaps it is this quickness to judge that is the
Knight/wight's character defect; certainly, it allows him to set into
motion the catastrophe that will end with his lonely, pale loitering
'on the cold hill's side' (44). Although most discussions of the poem
tend to focus on the Dame, on her grot, on her effect on the hero, on
her personality, the poem also insists on the centrality of the hero,
and the ramifications of his deed: the initial speaker is concerned only
with the Knight/wighf s unheroic loitering, while the Knight/wight
himself is keen to excuse and justify his conduct. The poet - Keats -
writes into his romance plot a supplementary preoccupation with the
hero's inadequacies, expressed through the Knight/wight's dismissal
of chivalric values. 49
As van Ghent notes, Keats's romances concentrate on the 'increas-
ingly somber and violent picture of what happens when the ideal
love-maiden allows herself to be loved' (88), although she too finds
the heroine responsible; in her formulation the hero is punished
because of the heroine's sexual surrender. However, the poems do not
follow an entirely conventional plot: the Dame is compelled to

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 89

'surrender' but Isabella, for instance, is an equal participant. It is more

fruitful to note that the violence the heroes suffer is traceable to the
narrative itself, and from there to the poet, rather than to (or on
account of) the heroine; Keats invests the familiar trope of blaming
the woman with a complexity that turns our attention back to the

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man. This is what Levinson calls his 'meta-allegory', the 'double-signi-
fication [that] prevents a discursive meltdown into expressive,
mimetic, and generic authenticity' (133). In the 'authentic' romance,
the Knight /wight's disastrous mistake would lead to greater under-
standing, increased awareness, and eventual victory, but in Keats's
new Romance the mistake serves to authenticate only the hero's
essential hollowness. The Knight/wight seeks to impose his power of
Self on the Dame - he desires to overwhelm her mysterious feminin-
ity with his strength of masculinity. As Robinson says, 'sight [is] the
sense of masculine power [but] it fails as an agent of power' (143).
Keats follows this when he makes sight the indicator both of the
Knight/wight's attempts to overpower and his inability to do so: 'And
there I shut her wild wild eyes/ With kisses four' (31-2, emphasis
added). The Indicator version is more telling: 'She took me to her elfin
grot/ And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,/ And there / shut her wild
sad eyes - /So kiss'd to sleep' (29-32, emphasis added). Once the Dame
tries to claim the symbol of masculine power - vision - she is hastily
prevented by the Knight/wight, whose action establishes his grab for
power and authority but also hints at his loss of both. The hero's
'latest dream' (last, final, or most recent) substitutes the vision of
drained and disempowered heroes ('pale kings and princes too,/ Pale
warriors, death-pale were they all', 37-8) who attempt to blame the
Dame for their plight but, as Wasserman and Enscoe agree, the poem
has not offered any other evidence of the Dame's balefulness:
'[Wasserman] rightly observes that "there is nothing in Keats's ballad
even suggesting the frequent interpretation that the fairy's child is
responsible for the knight's expulsion from the elfin grot; only his
inherent attribute of being mortal causes his magic withdrawal". The
knight, being mortal, aspired to the condition of immortality; but
having reached this immortal world, "the elfin grot", he must leave
again'. 50 If we read 'manhood' or 'masculinity' for 'mortality' - the
Knight/wight's definition of self-actuality - then the situation clears.
The hero's mistake has been to act on his sexual impulses, seize the
Dame, attempt to impose control; he has betrayed that his heroism is
based on a questionable code of conduct, itself commensurate with
the masculine ideal; he has emerged vitiated, drained and withered.

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90 The Romantic Paradox

Keats's familiar tale of chivalry thus rests on the understanding that

chivalry presupposes heroes who conform to a suspected ideal. Swann
concludes her excellent reading by asserting that 'the Knight's roman-
tic tale, knowingly deployed by the artful poet, encodes... doom in a
way that distributes its effects unequally, with all benefits accruing to

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the masculine subject' (91). And yet this does not recognise the real
violence done to the Knight/wight by the constructor of the romance,
the poet - Keats himself. Keats is not really interested in the Dame (a
point of view Swann would probably agree with); she is a device by
which he can expose the Knight/wight's inadequacies, his red-
blooded masculine heroism, and his viciousness. The hero, reduced to
parroting the first speaker's words, exists in a closed circle of failure,
his companions reflections of his loss of heroic viability. Instead of
accruing benefits to masculinity, Keats narrates its culpability, its
debits; he artfully - that is, through art - supplements the romantic
ballad with a vitality-draining condemnation of the Knight/wight's
heroic impulses. 51 In his longer romances, he continues to rewrite the
heroic ideal. 52 The hero is rewarded sensually; the body of the beloved
is gained, and consummation signals the successful resolution of the
love strand of the romance. However, in Keats's poetry the satisfying
of desire is never an uncomplicated blessing, as the presence of the
famous Odes in the same volume as the romances attests. 'Happy,
happy love' is most happy - most fortunate, and fortuitous - when it
is 'still unravish'd', 'for ever panting, and forever young' ('Ode on a
Grecian Urn', 25, 1, 27). In the Odes, Keats pictures a perfection of
suspension, an acknowledgement that desire exists paired with a
refusal to indulge it; 53 he constructs a romance of deferral that insists
on its own virtue. Lamia, however, opens the volume with the infi-
nitely desirable picture of a 'virgin purest lipp'd, yet in the lore/ Of
love deep learned to the red heart's core' (1:189-90) - the archetypal
experienced virgin, designed to stimulate Lycius' desires and occupy-
ing a curious mixed position of heroine and, to many critics, villain.
And yet this poem, like 'Dame', is really about the 'hero', Lycius,
and his struggle with Apollonius. Lamia is the catalyst whereby the
hero attempts independence: Lycius moves from abstract thought (the
world of Apollonius) to erotic fulfilment (the world of Lamia), a
journey that involves risks, the imposition of the supernatural, and
eventually a battle. Charles Lamb in an 1820 review noted that Lamia
'is of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of and calls
Lycius 'beautiful' (Spencer Hill 66), an interestingly feminising epithet
in light of the poem's insistence on Lamia's beauty; when van Ghent

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 91

notes that in Lamia 'the bride steals the hero' (113) and Stillinger
asserts that Lycius is unable to face reality (56 passim), they too
construct Lycius as the subordinate partner in the love triangle. Keats
gives Lycius both the heroic traits of mastery and irresistibility and the
more problematic passivity that encourages Apollonius to see him as

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Lamia's 'prey'. Indeed, from his first entrance Lycius compromises his
heroic role: 54

Lamia beheld [Lycius] coming, near, more near -

Close to her passing, in indifference drear,
His silent sandals swept the mossy green;
So neighbor'd to him, and yet so unseen
She stood: he pass'd, shut up in mysteries,
His mind wrapp'd like his mantle, while her eyes
Follow'd his steps 55
(1:237-43)

Far from realising his good fortune, Lycius does not even see Lamia,
requiring the near-farce of Lamia calling after him. Initially, he is the
opposite of the Knight/wight, who has only to see the Dame to take
her; Lycius needs prompting, even though a few lines earlier the
narrator has implied that Lamia comes in answer to his desire: 'Jove
heard his vows, and better'd his desire;/ For by some freakful chance
[Lycius] made retire/ From his companions' and instead takes the path
that leads him to Lamia (1:229-31, emphasis added). That he then
nearly misses Lamia underscores his abstraction, his absorption in
thought that threatens to disable heroic action. Thanks to Lamia's
quick thinking, however, he is brought to heed his heroic duty, and
falls prostrate with love.
While the plotline of Lamia follows that of the romance, the narra-
tor inflects his narrative with what Keats might have considered
'smokeability'. Robert Gittings defines this as 'open to sarcastic
comment', 56 and throughout Lamia Lycius is subjected to the inten-
sive gaze of a doubting narrator. Not only does he need help even to
see Lamia, and then help to bear physically the pressure of his passion
- he 'swoon[s]', heroine-like (1:289) - and then help to reach
Corinth, 57 he also flinches from encountering Apollonius: 'Lycius
shrank closer, as they met and past [Apollonius],/ Into his mantle,
adding wings to haste' (1:366-7). Instead of heroically meeting the
challenge, Lycius avoids it, as he attempts to do again when he does
not invite Apollonius to his wedding. In all clashes, Lycius 'shrinks' 58

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92 The Romantic Paradox

from conflict; despite his plot-role as hero, he prefers the safer, more
passive stance of lover in a palace. Keats establishes this dispute
between necessity and desire in the last lines of Part I: 'And but the
flitter-winged verse must tell,/ For truth's sake, what woe afterwards
befel,/ Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus,/ Shut from

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the busy world of more incredulous' (1:394-7). Lamia is obligated to
tell the 'truth' rather than sugar-coated wish-fulfilment; new Romance
must destroy the narrative of old Romance. Hence Part II opens with
its ironic demystifying of love and its straightforward revelation: 'Had
Lycius liv'd to hand his story down' (11:7).59 Importantly, Keats pushes
Lycius through stages of disempowerment; even as he forewarns us of
Lycius' death, the poet continues to disentangle Lycius from his
heroic duty, first allowing him the erotic play of sexual tyranny: 'he
took delight/ Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new./ His passion,
cruel grown, took on a hue/ Fierce and sanguineous as 'twas possible/
In one whose brow had no dark veins to swell' (II: 73-7). 60 This, with
its overtones of 'Dame'-ish unknightly dominance, allows the narra-
tor to continue to question Lycius' heroism, but the moment of true
disclosure is reserved for the wedding, where first Lycius is unable to
prevent Apollonius's entry - indeed, can only 'blusfh], and le[a]d the
old man through' (11:169-70) - and then proves thoroughly inade-
quate to the heroic duty of protecting his beloved. Instead, he
'beseech [es]' Apollonius and then merely (hysterically?) shouts at
him: 'Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man!/ Turn them
aside, wretch! . . . / / Corinthians! Look upon that grey-bearded
wretch!/ Mark how, possess'd, his lashless eyelids stretch/ Around his
demon eyes! Corinthians, see!/ My sweet bride withers at their
potency' (11:277-8, 287-90). At the moment of battle, Lycius can only
raise his voice, and draw attention to Apollonius's power of vision; the
villain succeeds in his most villainous duty of penetrating the heroine.
Hovering around this crisis is another kind of villainy and another
kind of desire: the narrative's attack on Lycius' character, and then his
body; the romance's need for a hero and its need to destroy him.
'Lycius's arms were empty of delight,/ As were his limbs of life, from
that same night./ On the high couch he lay! - his friends came round
- / Supported him - no pulse, nor breath they found,/ And, in its
marriage robe, the heavy body wound' (II: 307-11). Implicit in the last
line is the key to Lycius' fate: Keats puns on 'wound', allowing it to
represent both the harmless act of winding and the vicious act of
wounding. Lycius wears his marriage robe as his shroud, while simul-
taneously the guests wound him with the marriage robe itself. The

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 93

hero can survive neither his encounter with love, nor with villainy.
By concentrating the romance on a vapid and ineffectual hero,
Keats offers a critique of his value; the problem is not Lamia's perfidy
but Lycius' weakness. Despite Stillinger's contention that 'Lamia is
still basically an evil character, a snake-woman' (57), she is more

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Apollonius's victim than Lycius is hers. Apollonius is self-convicted of
sophistry and flawed vision. His reasoning - 'from every ill/ Of life
have I preserv'd thee to this day,/ And shall I see made a serpent's
prey?' (11:296-8) - rests on the incorrect assumption of Lamia's invid-
iousness: as she herself had said to Hermes (and the narrator had not
contested) T was a woman once' (1:117). Gerald Enscoe states it
plainly: 'Lamia is not really a serpent. By those who read the poem
simply, this central fact seem to have been ignored' (151). Similarly,
Apollonius is not a clear-eyed philosopher but exactly the cold-eyed
sophist the narrator condemns him as. Despite the tragedy of Lamia's
loss, the poem concentrates itself around Lycius and his limitations:
Lamia's visibility is at least partly due to Apollonius's obsession with
her and critical sympathy with his judgement on her. Lamia re-
presents the hero as drained of autonomy, functioning as an
accessory to Lamia or Apollonius. In this, Keats under-writes his char-
acter: he is both coy with details and submerges in Lycius a critique
on the heroic ideal. But Lycius escapes with a quick death; Isabella,
contrastingly, revolves around a 'vision of the horrors of physical
annihilation' (van Ghent 129) that once again suggests the incapac-
ity of the hero: Lorenzo, lucky in love, nevertheless cannot survive his
own romance narrative.
Keats begins by naturalising the romance: Isabella and Lorenzo
'could not but' love each other, a reflex action arising from proximity,
youth and a poetic attention to the demands of genre. At this point a
passive narrator, the speaker presents his readers with hero and
heroine in love, but prevented by Lorenzo's hesitation from declaring
it; however, although the 'timid quest' for love is assigned to Isabella
(55), the power to proclaim it is reserved for Lorenzo: 'but, alas,/
Honeyless days and days did he let pass' (31-2). In his inability to
speak we see the first indication of Lorenzo's heroic unfitness - he
requires proof of Isabella's love before he can enunciate his own,
which not only undermines his heroic agency but compromises
Isabella's 'heroinic' purity. Isabella, like Lamia, takes on some of the
heroic traits the 'hero' cannot manage: instead of waiting, she quests;
instead of listening, she speaks. Keats is already instituting his supple-
mentary narrative, hinting at Lorenzo's tendency to inaction, his

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94 The Romantic Paradox

impulse to allow Isabella to enact, or energise, his role. Although

Lorenzo speaks for twelve lines once encouraged by Isabella's tender
lisp, Keats draws our attention to his 'erstwhile timid lips' (69),
emphasising this aspect of Lorenzo's personality over his lover-status.
A 'strangely-alienated reflexiveness' (Levinson 19) is encyphered in

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the poem, a double voice commenting on its own speaking status, ill-
at-ease with the love-narrative and determined to infiltrate its
conventions. The inevitability of the love-story is shadowed by doubts
about Lorenzo's fitness; nature gives way before the culture of suspi-
cion and hiddenness. The masculine power of vision that haunted
'Dame' and betrayed Lamia is here perverted further by Isabella's
brothers, who penetrate the 'bower of hyacinth and musk' (85) repre-
senting the physical nature of Lorenzo's and Isabella's love. Keats asks
'how was it these same ledger-men could spy/ Fair Isabella in her
downy nest?/ How could they find out in Lorenzo's eye/ A straying
from his toil?' (137-40). The next stanza's turn to Boccaccio ostens-
ibly provides the answer by gesturing to the poem's source, an
already-written romance with an already-plotted tragedy. However,
the narrator's apologetic tone, his acknowledgement that he
somehow replots Boccaccio 'in English tongue' (159), shows that
Keats is not willing to scapegoat Boccaccio, and that he has moved
away from reportage to the supplementation that undergirds Isabella.
The brothers find out the lovers because the poet directs them to do
so; he allows their vision the required Apollonian sharpness, and he
puts Lorenzo into their power. The naturalness of the poem's opening
lines has transformed into the artifice of the brothers' perspicacity.
That Lorenzo fails to perceive their anger indicates that he has
already been deprived of his vision; his 'courteous' naivete and
matter-of-fact declaration to Isabella that 'we'll gain/ Out of the
amorous dark what day doth borrow' (205-6) illustrates that he virtu-
ally embraces his fate. The narrator encourages this by naming him a
'murder'd man' (209) proleptically, and by describing the 'forest' as
'quiet for the slaughter' (216), anticipatory and complicit. Lorenzo's
fatal lack of foresight combined with the ease with which he is killed
- There was Lorenzo slain and buried' (217) - demonstrate Keats's
hostility to the possibility of his survival. He is not even allowed a fair
fight, but is simply eliminated. His reappearance as a ghost merely
allows the narrator to dwell on his physical decay: 'the forest tomb/
Had marr'd his glossy hair ... / . . . and put cold doom/ Upon his lips,
and taken the soft lute/ From his lorn vice, and past his loamed ears/
Had made a miry channel for his tears' (275-80, emphasis added), and

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 95

to re-emphasise his passive death: 'without any word, from stabs he

fell' (296). Moreover, once Isabella, again on a quest, begins to dig
Lorenzo up, the narrator relishes the gory details of Lorenzo's disin-
terment; as Stillinger has outlined, Keats 'chooses to emphasize
corruption' (39) in his rewrite. Not only is an entire stanza given over

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to Isabella's attempts to prettify the 'horrid thing' that is Lorenzo's
head, 61 but the decapitation itself 'forgo[es]' the 'surgical tidiness'
(Stillinger 40) of Keats's source, Boccaccio, in favour of an uncontex-
tualised hacking: 'With duller steel than the Persean sword/ They cut
away' Lorenzo's head (393-4). 62 Isabella seems devoted in the
deranged sense of the word; her eagerness to cut up Lorenzo reflects
Keats's desire to sever heroism from its idealised mystique. In this
light the narrator's plaintive 'O for the gentleness of old Romance,/
The simple plaining of a minstrel's song!' (297-8) rings false; Isabella
is 'new Romance' pointedly and deliberately. While the narrator
seems genuinely taken aback at the turn the romance has taken - all
along he has tried to spin a story of love, of hero and heroine united
- plot supersedes this desire, instituting a morbid tale of obsession and
decay centred on the broken body of a weedy hero. By the time we,
with the brothers, are given a peek at 'the thing ... vile with green and
livid spot' (475), the supplementary discourse is surfacing; Isabella is
concerned not with young love, or thwarted love, or even Isabella, but
rather with the decomposition of the hero and his demotion to
fertiliser. Lorenzo proves able only to nourish sweet basil. His heroic
pretensions, suggested by the genre in which he appears, are undercut
by Keats until they, too, rot and decay. Lorenzo, like Lycius before
him, is both the necessary centre of the poem and negligible in his
actual force of character, but by keeping us consistently focused on his
absence Keats demonstrates the ease with which he is dispatched -
Lorenzo never even sees it coming.
The precedent Keats sets of violently finishing off his heroes is
rendered more metaphorical in The Eve of St Agnes. On the face of it,
Porphyro is a thoroughly successful hero: he achieves his physical
desire, wins Madeline's emotional commitment, and escapes the
threat posed by the demonized 'barbarian hordes' and 'hyena foemen'
(85, 86). The narrative plays up the savage nature of Madeline's kin
and plays down (although it does not omit) Porphyro's ignominious
recourse to 'stratagem' to ensnare Madeline and fulfil his desire.
Porphyro's less-than-honourable conduct with Madeline in itself begs
the question of his heroic nature: in his eagerness to melt into
Madeline's dream, Porphyro displays a preoccupation with his own

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96 The Romantic Paradox

desires that is consonant with social masculinity (and rather Lycius-

like) but not necessarily admirable. 63 Indeed, Porphyro's trickery
serves to emphasise what is already suggested by his name, with its
echoes of 'porphyry': even as porphyry is a type of rock distinguished
by its 'homogeneous base in which crystals of one or more minerals

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are disseminated', 64 so too Porphyro is a mixed hero, honourable and
base, respectful and opportunistic. But it is in his 'escape' that
Porphyro suffers violence. Van Ghent calls the 'elfin-storm from faery
land' seen by Porphyro as a 'boon' (343, 344) 'the dream-region of
demonic power' (103), which begins to suggest its danger, but what is
most brutal about the elimination of Porphyro (and Madeline) is that,
after having encouraged his readers to see Porphyro and Madeline as
young and vibrant lovers, Keats ends the poem in the far past, with
images of death and insubstantiality: 'They glide, like phantoms, into
the wide hall;/ Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide/ / And
they are gone: aye, ages long ago/ These lovers fled away into the
storm' (361-2, 370-1, emphasis added). Keats simply disseminates his
hero, forcing him into the past, a ghostly, disembodied revenant.
Supplementing Porphyro's romance is a casual throwing-off of
Porphyro's viability; once sent into the past, he is merely a memory,
and in this way Eve deals a body-blow to the hero's meaningfulness.
In this 'new Romance', Keats hollows out the old romance, withers
heroic potency and signals his impatience with the standards repre-
sented by the hero.
Levinson suggests that 'in Keats's Romantic romance, meaning is
something imposed by the author, badly derived from his precursors,
and fissuring rather than fusing essences and appearances. Meaning is
not a complement to being but an attack' (142). When Keats compels
Lycius, Lorenzo, the Knight/wight, even Porphyro to suffer varieties of
pain, indignity and outright violence, he encodes meaning in his
attacks. Long denigrated or apologised for, his romances represent not
poetic immaturity, 'failure', an embracing of the feminine, nor even
(entirely) a seamless 'life of allegory', but instead subvert common
assumptions about gender and genre. Keats secretes in his romances
an instructional narrative, a new Romance for his male readers, that
carries intimations of the uselessness, even the punishability, of
adherence to the heroic ideal of manhood. He expresses differance by
infusing the courtly romance with the unsettling question: why
should they be so fatal to heroes? For some time Keats's targeted audi-
ence closed ranks and blamed the femme fatale, the incapacity of
genre, Keats's embarrassing predilection for luxury and sensuality in

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 Failing the Romance: Coleridge and Keats 97

verse. No longer tenable, these explanations emphasise the difficulty

of challenging gender, not least in Keats himself, whose equivocations
over the smokeability of his romances are well-known. But in disal-
lowing his heroes their traditional rewards and happy endings, in
subjecting their bodies to decay, their motives to suspicion, and their

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narratives to deconstruction, Keats infuses his romances with unease,
with a lack of conviction in the value and viability of the hero. He
fulfils the promise of Coleridge's conversation poems, that heroism is
incompatible with subjectivity, and that, more subtly, masculinity
itself is an unsuitable pursuit. The grip of romance can be that ... of
nightmare' (Beer 9): the quest is revealed as a false trail. In the next
chapter, the hero is destroyed altogether.

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4
Interrupting the Romance:
Robinson, Hemans and Dead Men

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In discussing the romance it is to be expected that romantic love
would be prominent - and yet, while this book has without hesitation
explored sex and violence, it has so far delayed confronting the defin-
ing relationship of the genre, the love match. Partly this is due to the
surprising dearth of successfully resolved love-relationships in the
romance poetry of the period; as previous chapters have shown, the
poetry itself shies away from traditional romantic conclusions. Partly,
as well, I have left love to the penultimate chapter as a reflection of
the strategy of one of the poets to be discussed. Mary Robinson, like
Felicia Hemans, makes love central to her poetry, 1 and yet neither
appears comfortable with a reassuring 'happy ever after'. Instead, both
create romances wherein death, not love, is the resolution; where
poetry itself sabotages the romantic relationship. For Robinson, genre
works against itself: she infiltrates her romances with a tactical obfus-
cation, imaged through horrific dreams, narrative delay, or banality in
place of climax. Leading her readers through a world of romance
heavily tinged with the Gothic, she, to paraphrase EJ. Clery, 'recog-
nises that the [romance] is bound by the metaphysics of appearance,
that [its metaphorics are] of necessity given over to superstition'. 2 In
Robinson, the romance is taken over from within by the supernatural,
superstition and unexplained Gothicisms that belie and eventually
explode its 'appearance'. Some thirty years on, writing in a changed
cultural atmosphere from a very different social position, Hemans too
recognises the essential emptiness of the romance, dramatising its
inadequacies by allowing, then destroying, the emotionally charged
love-relationship. Unlike Robinson, Hemans dwells on her images of
failure; indeed, her romances rely on exactly their own destruction.
Where Robinson uses dreams, Hemans poeticises reality; where

98

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 99

Robinson manipulates delay and expectation, Hemans glories in the

immediate experience of violent loss. Both poets, however, structure
their most forceful romances around the spectacle of the weakened,
dying or dead man, and for both, this in itself constitutes violence. If,
as I shall discuss, representation can function as an expression of

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desire, then Robinson's and Hemans's interruptions of the romance
can be read as disguised expressions of desire, as if for a woman
writing the only outlet for female desire is through violence. Neither
poet can imagine a securely-resolved romance, but both poets focus
resolutely on desire and its consequences. Romantic love, in its very
failure, figures and emblematises its own emptiness.
Desire is fundamental to the romance, and where previous chapters
have explored its sexual and performative guises, here it returns to
love, its cultural haven. Love provides, or perhaps necessitates, a safe
outlet for desire, allowing lust, greed, need, and other less attractive
impulses to be repackaged as the dream solution - the ideal and
idealised relationship of the love match that justifies social require-
ments of family, property and government. As many social historians
- most notably Lawrence Stone - have made clear, in the late eigh-
teenth century there was a shift towards love as the basis of marriage
and family, rather than social duty. 3 Indeed, to love becomes a duty in
the nineteenth century. In the 1790s, however, the novelistic
romance relies on true love to enable its lot; fed by sensibility, the
romance, including its Gothic manifestations, is as much about girl-
gets-boy as boy-slays-villain. In countertone to the thwarted heroes of
Keats and Coleridge, for instance, heroines become the focus, and in
the poetical romances of Robinson they also function as the instiga-
tors, whether passively as in 'Golfre' and The Murdered Maid', or
more creatively as in The Lady of the Black Tower'. However, the
romance does not transform into a vehicle for female empowerment;
on the contrary, Robinson and Hemans both seem to use violence
constructively: that is, in disallowing romantic resolution, in filtering
desire through violence, they demonstrate the weakness, the exclu-
sions, figured by love, and they do so by associating it explicitly with
violence. Niklas Luhmann speaks of 'incommunicability' and its
entrenchment during the late eighteenth century; for him, it is a
symptom of the inability of the late-Enlightenment world to cope
with its own emphasis on differentiation: 'categorical barriers to
communication began to emerge. It was not the failure of skilfulness
that is the problem, but the lack of a capacity for sincerity. ... The old
distinction between sincere and insincere love was also abrogated, to be

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100 The Romantic Paradox

replaced by a new sort of difference of conscious and unconscious, procliv-

ities, drives and aims. ... All behaviour remained ambivalent ... And
this in turn meant nothing other than incommunicability'. 4
Luhmann's theoretics of love work to show that in the late eigh-
teenth century something happened to change the way romance -

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that is, love - is represented; his formulation of 'incommunicability'
is one way of saying that relations were breaking down. The turn to
violence is another. Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow, in their intro-
duction to a collection of essays entitled Sex and Violence, define
violence as 'legislated, controlled, and studied outside or beyond
normal, constructive human practice. Violence is by definition unac-
ceptable, out of control, beyond reason. Furthermore, it is
transgressive; transgressive of our sense of bodily integrity and the
spirit enclosed therein which enables the notion of violation to apply
to more than physical hurt'. 5 For them, violence is the unspoken,
omnipresent Other against which we define 'culture' - that which is
contained, restrained, representative, 'civilised'. Robinson and
Hemans, however, do not relegate violence to the margins as unac-
ceptable; neither do they highlight it as an unnatural intrusion into
the social order. Instead, each locates violence squarely within the
realm of normal human contact by associating it intimately with love,
the emotion that facilitates contact. For each, the link with desire is
inescapable.
Moreover, Robinson especially responds to cultural pressure by
openly representing that which is simultaneously authorised and
suppressed: irrationality. The efforts made in the 1790s to repress
transgression resulted in a black market in transgression, not to
mention a kind of cultural romantic hysteria:6 curbs on free speech
were matched by increased outbursts of public disorder; an increasing
reliance on propriety found its evil twin in racy newspaper cartoons
and knowing, arch gossip over the public figures of the demi-monde. 7
If, as Harvey and Gow assert, 'sexuality is ... associated in Anglo-
American cultures with the transgressive individual, that aspect of self
that emerges through lack of control, that exists and finds expression
against reason' (2), then love and desire in the romance and their
collusion with violence reify the insecurities and repressions of a
frightened and anxious culture. Escape to romance means only the
reintroduction of transgression in another form: even as chivalry
promises order but promotes oppression, so too romantic love
promises union but enacts disintegration. As Harvey and Gow point
out, the 'substantive categories of violence ... include [the] less visible

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 101

categories of broken contract and the notion of threat' (12). Even as

the reader of Robinson's violent romances is met with unexpected
denouements and the loss of love - one form of broken contract - and
threatened with Gothic apparatus and plots driven by superstition, so
too Robinson herself disables conclusions based on Gothic rewritings

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of romance: 'sublimity and violence are native to obscurity', says
Clery, echoing Burke (79), and Robinson sees to it that obscurity most
forcibly characterises her romances. In this way, she demonstrates the
contradictions of the decade: expression and repression, desire and
deflation, violence and banality cohabit, producing poetic scenarios
wherein the only certainty is obscurity. Robinson does not avoid
violence, but neither does she engage with it directly; her deliberately
violent spectacles are undermined, not through evasion, but through
a withering of the power her images insist on only to a point. Aware
that 'the objectification of highly-charged emotional events [is] itself
a form of violence' (Harvey and Gow 2), Robinson writes Gothicised
poetry that, somehow, always concludes at the moment of transition
from forceful to limp.
Desire, then, provides the site on which romance and violence build
their poetical edifice. 'Acting freely on sexual desire is transgressive,
and to act freely on sexual desire is to unleash the sexual master in
oneself: 8 feeling desire may be passive and harmless (heroines of
sensibility often feel desire), but acting on it is self-authorising and
potentially harmful (as so many heroes and villains demonstrate).
Parenthetically, desire has its gendered versions; in the poetical
romance, however, desire infiltrates and overturns gendered bound-
aries. While Cameron and Frazer can only see sexual violence as a
'masculine' activity, Robinson's and Hemans's poetry interestingly
imports femininity into violence;9 although muted, their 'unleashing'
of female desire results in the violent elimination of the male player.10
Cameron and Frazer also connect sexual violence with an 'urge to
authorship' that they associate with 'Enlightenment individualism -
the construction of self as a narrative persona, as the hero of a text'
(162). In their readings of twentieth-century sex crimes, they refer to
eighteenth-century definitions of subjectivity, even citizenship, using
language that continues to tie together sex, violence and masculine
desire. However, Robinson's and Hemans's poetry feature the 'urge to
authorship' and 'the construction of self that distinguish sexual
violence - not, indeed, figured by the authors themselves, but by their
heroines and their plots. Robinson's 'Golfre' revolves around an
unfinished folk tale about a noble girl-baby switched at birth with a

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102 The Romantic Paradox

peasant's still-born daughter; The Lady of the Black Tower' is the hero
of the text; Hemans's Records of Woman seek specifically to poeticise
romance-laden moments in the lives of real and fictional women. And
these poems of romance maintain narrative trajectories punctuated by
violence dependent on, even arising from, moments of romantically

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charged desire.
Cameron and Frazer argue that sexual violence is an expression of
immediately repressed desire, that Enlightenment individuality and
freedom lead to 'subjection [by] social forces' and that this pressure
eventually results in an ideology that glorifies transgression as 'erotic
and beautiful', developed by 'the Romantics' into a 'full-blown
aesthetics' (160). Leaving aside the vast and flattening generalities
that inform this understanding of literary history, it does suggest a
useful matrix, for romance abounds with repressed heroines. If one
opens Cameron's and Frazer's formulation to allow for the possibility
of female desire, something interesting happens: violence becomes,
not the destroyer of romance, but its enabler. If the objects of desire
seize the subject-position, not only feel but express their desire for a
romantic partner - for Robinson and Hemans, a man 11 - what results
is a topsy-turvy world: men become sexual objects, women become
desiring subjects, and violence becomes the only possible form of
expression. Desire is manifested through its own violent repression.
Complicated by the romance's dramatis personae of hero (active, male),
villain (active, male), and heroine (passive, female), this scenario
transforms not so much roles as performance - desire, necessary yet
taboo, filtered through love, reliant on romance, and dependent on
'correct' gender placements, functions as its own extinguisher. It both
causes violence and is destroyed by it. The gendered and sexualised
nature of violence' (Cameron and Frazer 156) in the romances of
Robinson and Hemans is intimately and of necessity linked to their
female characters' ability to feel deeply but only enunciate those feel-
ings obliquely. Because of this, then, the many dead men in their
poetic romances function as markers of female desire. And that desire,
like the violence that infects and circumscribes it, is enclosed in the
insular world of the romance and takes on the form allowed by genre:
it presents itself romantically, the love of a maid for her swain, in
danger of being foiled by a villain. The romantic landscapes of
Robinson and Hemans are peopled by familiar figures who nonethe-
less perform their allotted roles with variations. Robinson's - 'Gothic',
supernatural, interlinked - play with a metaphorics of dreams and
allusion, while Hemans's build on proto-Victorian ideals of duty,

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 103

endurance and morality, and do not flinch from representing inhu-

manity. For both poets, however, resolution is garbed not in
wedding-clothes, but a shroud.

Deflected violence and dream-visions: Mary Robinson

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According to Luhmann, 'Romanticism's response to [romantic insta-
bility and incommunicability], in which the semantics of love came
into conflict with demands that the personal world be endowed with
permanent meaning, was to take flight into exaggeration' (144).
Certainly, Robinson's Gothic romances construct a poetics of exag-
geration; emotions, events, personalities are heightened and
sensationalised. What Curran calls her 'pathetic poetry' finds its
meaning in loss, despair and disruption: 'this is a sad world, one that
witnesses constant abuses of power, where armies do no one any
good, where class conflict is systemic and cannot be wished away by
liberal compromise, and where not perspectivism but insanity or stark
alienation seem the logical end of interiorizing social conditions'. 12
Curran does not mention romantic love, but by implication it is as
hopeless as the rest: exaggerating the risks and dangers of romance,
Robinson inflects desire - for love, for happiness, for fulfilment - with
perversion and sensationalism. At the same time, she imports to desire
a centrality that rationalises its dangerous effects; for Robinson, desire
disguised as love and love infected with desire undermine and even-
tually destroy romantic union. There is an easy reason for this:
Robinson's readers were fully aware of her own failed romances with,
in the 1780s, the Prince of Wales, and in the 1790s, Banastre
Tarleton. 13 Cartoonists and newspaper satirists routinely reported on
her liaisons, her public appearances, her efforts to support herself, and
frequently the tone was itself accented with violence, as in the Gilray
print The Thunderer'. This foregrounds Tarleton and a feather-
headed Prince of Wales as the suitors for Robinson's favours; Tarleton
brandishes a phallic sword while the Prince can manage only a thin
and wilting riding-crop. But the real violence is saved for Robinson,
spread-eagled in miniature on a pole that advertises 'Alamode Beef,
hot every Night' and features a grinning face looking up her hiked
skirt.14 Robinson's public persona of abandoned, victimised, sexually
suspect woman, linked with her own periodic self-refashionings, indi-
cate her awareness of the associations her readers made between the
writer and the work, which in turn suggests her utilisation of a con-
venient marketing tool. 15 The 'real contradictions and dangers which

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104 The Romantic Paradox

every gentlewoman of the period potentially faced' (Clery 74) -

dangers of personal and financial loss and violation - were well-
known to Robinson: she lived them. To infer, then, some personal
meaning in the poetry of a writer whose Memoirs were left unfinished
at her death is merely to allow in Robinson the ability to exploit her

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personal experience.
However, Robinson's romances go beyond pallid self-justification or
morbid self-mining or even veiled autobiography. Her Gothicism is
extreme, and both psychologically and physically based. Her characters
love and lose with an emphasis on criminality and mental imbalance
that both reveals and relies on the violent 'objectification of highly
charged emotional events' (Harvey and Gow 2). It is tempting to see
this as a backlash against the Delia Cruscan eroticism that, for many of
her readers, firmly fixed her as a figure of emotional excess and aban-
donment: 16 the Gothic poetry persistently disallows and deflates the
expected romantic denouement. Clery speaks of the 'therapeutics of
romance' which necessitate the happy ending (80), but Robinson stub-
bornly refuses this prescription: for her, the happy ending is neither
guaranteed or even poetically desirable. It is this last that is most telling
in Robinson's world of romance, moreover, for she does not reject
outright the happy ending, as The Lady of the Black Tower', or even
'Golfre', for instance, shows. Instead, she twists it: she provides an
ending both 'happy' and empty, unfulfilling, or untenable, narratively
and creatively. Her romantically Gothic poems show their readers two
options: one is the straightforwardly shocking, lurid, unhappy ending;
the other a placid, credulous, happy ending that suffers from debilitat-
ing structural weakness. In the first, violence is done to characters; in
the second, to the poetry itself. In both, the violence is conveyed, ulti-
mately, indirectly: Robinson veils her violent poetry and in this way
contributes to the fin-de-siecle dread of directness.
This is not to say that Robinson's poems evade the representation of
violence altogether. Indeed, as the Gothic scenarios of poems such as
'Golfre' and The Hermit of Mont Blanc' make plain, Robinson can be
liberal in her sprinklings of blood and gore. However, even as she laces
her poetic narratives with spectres, ghouls, bodies and suicides, she
also inserts directive tags that turn the attention, ultimately defusing
the horror that, paradoxically, she seems unhesitatingly to pursue. In
this, she elides the force of her violent scenes and transforms the
potentially terrifying into the merely moral; this is especially true of
'Golfre. A Gothic Swiss Tale'. In this poem, Robinson rewrites scenes
familiar to its readers: we are confronted with the well-known

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 105

machinery of nature's force, but the beaches, mountains and forests

here function not to reveal the nobility and dignity of the mind
infused by nature, but to foreshadow and accompany, in their more
well-known guise of the pathetic fallacy, the turbulent emotions and
farcical efforts of characters at the mercy of their emotions, and

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plagued by villainous, human, forces; Robinson builds into her poetic
romances denunciations of the terrors man inflicts on, not man, but
woman. The Gothic-romantic 'Golfre', for instance, relies for its full
effect on a combination of madness, violence, and a concluding turn
towards bathos that is reminiscent of the strangely unaffecting moral-
ising offered by Coleridge at the end of The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner'. 17
Robinson keenly invokes, and disarms, a cauldron of violent poetic
Gothicism. The characters of the romance - knight, lady, villain - and
its themes - love, loss, reunion, for instance - are remapped onto a
landscape uncomfortable with its own defining landmarks. Curran
identifies 'the common theme of Robinson's pathetic poetry' as being
'a sudden and total displacement of the stabilities on which existences
depend' (31); one of the stabilities of genre is the familiarities of
'happily ever after', and this is the assumption that Robinson most
consistently displaces. 'Golfre' on the one hand presupposes its audi-
ence's familiarity with a certain style of writing; subtitled 'A Gothic
Swiss Tale', it announces its place as one of the Lyrical Tales of the
collection in which it appears. 18 As a 'Gothic' tale, it contains the
requisite supernatural, spooky elements of a mysterious death, disem-
bodied voices, bloody murder and so on (though without the
Radcliffian turn to the commonsensical explanation of the inexplic-
able). Robinson, in setting the tale in Switzerland, also makes use of
religious convention, dotting the poem with monks and crucifixes. In
this way she prepares her readers for the romance to follow, itself
almost a pastiche of romantic convention, albeit with a subversive
tinge. Robinson uses her first stanzas to set the scene, waiting until
stanza 5 to introduce the Baron Golfre, but the revelation of his true
character is further delayed. At first, he is represented as monklike, 'to
solitude devoted', spending his nights in prayer. Only in the next
stanzas does Robinson complicate this picture, and allow the simulta-
neous entry of both violence and the supernatural:

And yet his pray'r was little mark'd

With pure and calm devotion;
For oft, upon the pavement bare,

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106 The Romantic Paradox

He'd dash his limbs, and rend his hair,

With terrible emotion!

And sometimes he, at midnight hour,

Would howl, like wolves wide-prowling;

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And pale the lamps would glimmer round—
And deep the self-mov'd bell would sound,
A knell prophetic tolling!
(I: 26-35)

Two stanzas later, she also introduces the romantic element:

Beneath the steep, a maiden dwelt,

The dove-ey'd Zorietto;
A damsel bless'd with ev'ry grace—
And springing from as old a race,
As lady of Loretto!
(I: 46-50)

Zorietto lives peacefully with her 'aged sire', yet her existence is char-
acterised by 'fear' of the mysterious castle of the Baron, with its
unearthly sounds and ghostly lamps, and by the 'dismal tale' her sire
'oft... was telling'. To emphasise the point, Robinson repeats the line
'A dismal tale was telling' four times in as many stanzas with only
small variations, giving the impression that this is all he ever tells, and
the reader plainly sees that the tale is Zorietto's own:

He told a long and dismal tale,

How a fair lady perish'd;
How her sweet baby, doom'd to be
The partner of her destiny,
Was by a peasant cherish'd!

He told a long and dismal tale,

How, from a flinty tow'r,
A lady wailing loud was seen,
The lofty grated bars between,
At daylight's purple hour!

He told a tale of bitter woe,

His heart with pity swelling,

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 107

How the fair lady pin'd and died,

And how her ghost, at Christmas-tide—
Would wander - near her dwelling.

He told her, how a lowly dame

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The lady, lorn, befriended—
Who chang'd her own dear baby, dead,
And took the lady's in its stead—
And then - 'Forgive her, heav'n', he said;
And so his story ended.
(I: 71-90)

Zorietto hears but does not recognise her own story of origin, just as
later she remains blind to the Baron's intentions - for sure enough, to
see her is to love her, and after appearing at her door with pale face,
wild eyes, and a bloody poniard, crazy with terror, Golfre 'gaz'd,
admir'd!/ The peasant girl his fancy fir'd,/ And set his senses
madding!' (II: 73-5).
Curran writes that Robinson, 'herself a deeply victimized woman', is
'attuned ... to endemic injustice and abuse of power' (30), and in
'Golfre' she explores the scenario of a woman victimised by the aris-
tocratic abuse of sexual power. Instead of courting Zorietto, Golfre
claims her, taking along a retinue of soldiers to guard the door, and
when Zorietto enters, he 'dart[s] forth,/ His trembling victim seizing',
the violent imagery underlining Golfre's role as ravisher, rather than
lover. And yet Robinson is not merely playing with stereotypes: unlike
the ravisher of Gothic convention, Golfre honestly intends marriage:
and by merging lover-hero and ravisher-villain, Robinson suggests not
merely the abuse of power, but further, the abuse of romanticised
concepts of love and desire. In 'Golfre', love itself becomes a Gothic
construct, since even when confronted with a disembodied 'snowy
hand ... moving round the chamber' carrying a 'clasp of pearl ...
fix'd to a zone of amber' and the sudden appearance of 'such horrors
as attend the dead' in Zorietto's cottage, the Baron responds only by
invoking 'Jesu' and drawing his dagger (III: 61-2, 64-5, 74, 76).
Sensible Zorietto calls on heaven to save her, to which Golfre replies
'Yes, heav'n will save thee ... to be my bride!' (Ill: 81-2). Supremely
indifferent to supernatural machinery, Golfre relies on strength of
arms and a matter-of-fact twisting of Zorietto's pleas to heaven to his
advantage. But then, Zorietto herself underreacts; only the old
goatherd sees the phenomena as omens against the marriage, and as a

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108 The Romantic Paradox

reminder of the death of the Baron's first wife (who died in the 'black
tower' [III: 94], thus linking 'Golfre' to The Lady of the Black Tower'
in site if not in subject-matter). After all this, Zorietto refuses Golfre
only on the romantic grounds that 'she loved another' (III: IV: 2); and,
the ghostly doings forgotten, Golfre merely frames her sire in a set-up

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Robinson herself has complied with. At the end of Part 2, when Golfre
first came to the little cottage, we were told of 'a sword of gold,/
Which poverty might well behold/ With eyes wide stretch'd and
greedy!' (II: 88-90). Now, in Part 4, we learn that 'his sword was gone;
the goatherd swain/ Seem'd guilty, past recalling' and so, in true
romance style, Zorietto trades herself for her sire, and 'the marriage
day was fix'd' (IV: 6-7, 26).
Robinson salts 'Golfre' liberally with romance and violence: for the
Baron, the two are interchangeable, and Robinson continually plays
one off the other. In a single stanza, for instance, Golfre gets rid of his
rival: 'he seiz'd the youth, and madly strew'd/ The white cliff with his
streaming blood,/ Then hurl'd him down its side', then merely puts
about a story centring on a hungry wolf (IV: 43-5, 46 passim).19 The
wedding immediately follows; the clasp of pearl and zone of amber
again make their appearance, only to stream with blood upon touch-
ing Zorietto, and her identity as Goitre's daughter is suggested,
although not declared, by the bursting of the pearl clasp, the exposure
of Zorietto's 'beating side', and the revelation of 'three crimson spots',
borne also by Goitre's first wife and 'the baby, who had early died'
(IV:89, 91, 98). One would think that this would be the poem's
climactic moment, but we are only in Part 4 of a five-part poem, and
Robinson subverts her own subversive turn to the sensationalism of
incest by allowing the wedding, apparently, to proceed, and Zorietto
to become Goitre's 'bride'. Curran describes the Lyrical Tales as
containing 'poems of grotesque, even extreme alienation' (32), and
'Golfre' exemplifies this description: at each moment of Gothic horror
the poem merely moves on without pause; climax becomes anti-
climax, the characters themselves seeming not to notice the oddity of
their Gothicised lives, while the piling up of violent and bloody
conflicts begins, through repetition, to lose its force. Partly because no
one in the poem reacts to the horrors, partly because Robinson, or her
narrator, moves on so swiftly from each small explosion, the violence
comes to seem cartoonish. Robinson's animation frames are stanzas:
no sooner does a sensation emerge, punctuated by the obligatory
exclamation mark, than we move on - hence stanza 20 (96-100) of
Part 4:

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 109

And now remembrance brought to view,

(For heav'n the truth discloses,)
The baby, who had early died,
Bore, tinted on its little side,
Three spots - as red as roses!

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which glides smoothly to stanza 21 (101-5):

Now, ere the wedding-day had past,

Stern Golfre and his bride
Walk'd forth to taste the evening breeze,
Soft sighing mid the sombre trees,
That drest the mountain's side.

Part 4 then ends quietly with a vision of two angelic figures ascending
to heaven, while Part 5 begins with a sudden storm, showing that,
while sensation may repair itself seamlessly within the poem, peace is
equally prone to sudden rupture.
Finally, we have reached the poem's climax, centred not on, the
violent and rapacious style of love characterised by Golfre, nor even
the mystery of the dead Lady of the Tower and her baby, but on the
marginalised love of Zorietto and her sweetheart: the storm wakens
Zorietto's constitutional fear and provokes Golfre to ask 'what did she
fear?' (V: 36). Zorietto fears 'the wolf which did my lover slay'; her
maddened outburst draws from him an oblique confession - T see thy
vengeful eyeballs roll - / Thou com'st to claim my guilty soul', he cries
to no one in particular (V: 41, 53-4). Such is the blackness of Goitre's
soul that he could be calling out to the lover we have seen him murder
or the wife he has probably murdered - the dead mother whose voice
has 'utter'd' '"hear me!'" periodically throughout the poem. Climax
builds on climax now: the black tower sprouts angel's wings, Golfre
confesses to murder (in suitably violent terms - "Twas I who tore the
quiv'ring wound,/ Pluck'd forth the heart, and scatter'd round/ The
lifestream of thy lover' [V: 78-80]), and the narrator suddenly calls
Zorietto 'his daughter' (V: 69). Golfre is revealed at dawn as 'a dread-
ful sight,/ Black, wither'd, smear'd with gore!' and his remains are
hung on a gibbet (V: 89-90).
After all this turmoil, it seems faintly ridiculous to end the poem
with a familiar and comfortable religious moral, and yet, as Coleridge
does with 'Rime', so too Robinson:

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110 The Romantic Paradox

For charity and pity kind,

To gentle souls are giv'n;
And mercy is the sainted pow'r
Which beams thr6' mis'ry's darkest hour,
And lights the way - to heav'n.

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(V: 101-5)

Suddenly, Gothic violence and disrupted, murderous romance are

revealed to be in the service of a tidy, rather unimaginative moralist.
Robinson achieves closure not through the logic of plot, or through a
reflective turn to a deeper philosophy, but through a facile religiosity that
has not figured at all in the preceding 109 stanzas (547 lines), that, more-
over, praises virtues not at all in evidence in the poem. While the flurried
reader might gain some comfort from this ending, the tale itself is let
down; far from resolving its violence, this final stanza denies its exis-
tence, ignores the pagan Gothicism that has created the poem's conflicts,
and even defuses the subversive eroticism that has permitted a father to
marry his daughter without repercussion (the disaster that followed was
rooted in Goitre's murders rather than his incestuous desires). This
constitutes another form of violence: structural damage to a poem depen-
dent for its force on burst after burst of sensationalism. Robinson leads
her readers straight up to the sight of a torn body disintegrating on a
gibbet and then, without ceremony, transforms this deathly image into
an uncontestable, unconvincing, violet-scented and very weak banality.
However, this bathos indicates Robinson's skill in dramatically de-poeti-
cising her poem: this is the conclusion one might expect, say, from
Hannah More, whose student Robinson had been as a girl. It also drama-
tises Robinson's characteristic pull back from a devoted engagement with
the violence she has, up to this point, seemed to glory in.
'Golfre"s turn to banality frustrates the otherwise saturated nature
of the poem's violence; it means that even at the moment of
confrontation Robinson can pull back to platitudes, whitewash the
gibbet, and turn the readers' attention to what is, in context, empty
moralising. Incest 20 and forced marriage, the perversions of romance,
are bloodily intercut with murder and imprisonment, yet readers are
left pondering charity, pity and mercy. Robinson deflects violence in
this poem, protecting her readers from a confrontation with exagger-
ated and extreme wrong-doing, even as she also spices the romance
with more than the usual protracted love affair or scary castle. In The
Hermit of Mont-Blanc', she follows an alternate route. In this poem,
the romance is shunted to the past:

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 111

... In early youth,

Cross'd in the fond 21 affections of his soul
By false Ambition, from his parent home
He, solitary, wander'd; 22 while the Maid
Whose peerless beauty won his yielding heart

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Pined in monastic horrors! ...

His Orisons he pour'd, for her, whose hours

Were wasted in oblivion ...

... For, still, Love

A dark, though unpolluted altar, rear'd
On the white waste of wonders!
(12-17, 21-2, 24-6)

Again, Robinson sets a familiar scene: love opposed, lovers parted,

woman holed up in 'monastic horrors', man leading a life of contem-
plation, prayer and regret.23 Interestingly, the hermit seems uncertain
about his object of worship: although he sets up a cross, he 'pours'
orisons 'for her', not for God. 'Orisons' are, strictly speaking, merely
prayers, but in common parlance are for the benefit of God; the
hermit's ambiguous prayers provide the first instance of error, the first
hint of disorder (the separation of the lovers, while unpleasant, is also
standard). Robinson places the hermit in a landscape noted for its
grandeur and sublimity - even before Shelley and Coleridge, Mont
Blanc's poetic potential had been tapped, most notably by Georgiana
Cavendish - but to the hermit, nature is characterised by violence: he
gathers his food on summits that 'rock' the 'giddy brain' with 'fear'; he
is awakened at night by howling wolves and destructive storms that
send rocks 'plunging'; he views 'jutting blockfs] of now-encrusted ice'
and 'shudders'; even in summer his 'pensive gaze/ Trac'd the swift
storm advancing whose broad wing/ Blacken'd the rushy dome of his
lone hut' (65, 70, 71-2, 78-80). Although Robinson superficially cele-
brates the hermit's sensibility, his generosity ('nothing loath by pity or
by pray'r/ Was he, to save the wretched', 51-2), and his fidelity, she
also endows him with a tearfulness that sees only the 'terrible' in
nature and that has inspired him to flee society when his love is
forbidden, rather than work for its allowance. 'Hermif thus sets up a
romantic scenario on several levels - star-crossed lovers, affective land-
scape - only to embed in the poem's first 102 lines a suggestion of the
hermit's weakness rather than strength, defeatism rather than valour.

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112 The Romantic Paradox

Line 103 introduces the Gothic 'dreary night' in winter that changes
the hermit's life forever: for a full stanza (21 lines), she dwells on his
sudden, unexplained surrender to fear.

Sudden, the HERMIT started from his couch

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Fear-struck and trembling! Ev'ry limb was shook
With painful agitation. On his cheek
The blanch'd interpreter of horror mute
Sat terribly impressive! In his breast
The ruddy fount of life convulsive flow'd
And his broad eyes, fix'd motionless as death,
Gaz'd vacantly aghast!

And Silence, like a fearful centinel [sic]

Marking the peril which awaited near, 24
Conspir'd with sullen Night, to wrap the scene
In tenfold horrors. Thrice he rose; and thrice
His feet recoil'd; and still the livid flame
Lengthen'd and quiver'd as the moaning wind
Pass'd thro' the rushy crevice, while his heart
Beat, like the death-watch, in his shudd'ring breast.
(106-13, 116-23)

As with 'Golfre', the Gothicism is unexplained: like Zorietto, the

hermit seems simply to Fear - an object for his fear is unimportant. He
is suddenly, irrationally, superstitiously Afraid, an endemic emotion,
as natural to him as 'shudd'ring'. Robinson begins to make plain what
she has intimated before: the hermit inhabits a romantic landscape
and has lived a romantic plotline, but he lacks a romantic personality
- he is not a hero, although his actions may sometimes appear heroic.
As Robinson notes, 'fear/ Will sometimes take the shape of fortitude,/
And force men into bravery' (128-30). The hermit's display of
enforced bravery consists of rushing to the window and unfastening
the bolt; the wind blows out his candle, 'and again/ His soul was thrill'd
with terror' (133-4). Thrill'd' connotes a certain enjoyment of his
fear, a physical pleasure gained, not from love or the presence of his
beloved, but from self-induced fear of natural elements - storm, wind
- that he must have experienced before in his five years on the moun-
tain. Since this is in part a Gothic poem, Robinson allows the fear also
to act as a premonition: disaster is imminent, but she no sooner intro-
duces it than she pulls back. The hermit has suddenly begun to rush

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 113

down the hill towards a 'stream of light' 'when a shriek of death/ Re-
echoed to the valley' (144, 148-9); this impels him to 'fl[y]/ ... / Half
hoping, half despairing, to the scene/ Of wonder-waking anguish',
only for the lights to go out, the darkness and wind to 'increas[e] the
Hermit's fears', and for 'four freezing hours' of prayer to ensue (149,

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151-2, 156). Robinson builds ambiguity on uncertainty: she gives the
hermit no motivation for his flight other than fear, she does not make
it clear if he runs from or towards the shriek of death; indeed, she
moves so swiftly past this moment of violence that, at this point, it
seems less contributory to the hermit's fear than does 'the hollow
tongues/ Of cavern'd winds' (154-5). That the hermit then settles
down to pray for four hours - conveniently, the length of time needed
for the sun to rise - serves to delay the moment of confrontation as
well as reinforce the timidity of the hermit.
At dawn, the hermit thanks God he has not fallen down a chasm,
and then catches sight of bloody tracks that, he assumes, 'mar[k] the
fate/ Of some night traveller, whose bleeding form/ Had toppled from
the Summit' (172-4). The reality is worse, and, considering the nature
of the poem's genre, not entirely unexpected:

... lifeless, ghastly, paler than the snow

On which her cheek repos'd, his darling Maid
Slept in the dream of Death! Frantic and wild
He clasp'd her stiff ning form, and bath'd with tears
The lilies of her bosom, - icy cold—
Yet beautiful and spotless.
(177-82)

The hermit apparently does not, while the reader cannot help but,
remember the shriek of death: Robinson inserts 30 lines between its
sound and the discovery of the body, but from here to the poem's end
- only another 23 lines - the hermit's fate is sealed. Ten lines from the
finding of the body the hermit discovers the murderer, a ruffian
soldier whose hands are still bloody from the deed and whose guilt is
made plain by the victim's golden cross he wears. Robinson goes one
step further, and adds rape to the maid's violent experience:
'ANCHORET!/ Thy VESTAL Saint, by his unhallow'd hands/ Torn from
RELIGION'S Altar, has been made/ The sport of a dark Fiend, whose
recreant Soul/ Had sham'd the cause of Valour!' (194-8). The direct
address to the hermit - 'ANCHORET!' - and the accusatory tone in
which the narrator reveals the maid's horror suggest a built-in failure

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114 The Romantic Paradox

on the hermit's part: his love raped and murdered, the villain before
him, his heroic/romantic duty is clear, but this poem has maintained,
not the hermit's heroism, but his fear, from the start. 'Hermit' rein-
forces Robinson's ethic of evasion: the hermit, completely inadequate
to the task of protecting his beloved from violence, can only listen,

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paralysed with terror, to her shrieks of death, and once confronted
with, in quick succession, her 'bleeding form' and her bloodied killer,
reacts by running away, 'and after three lone weeks, of pain and
pray'r/ Shrunk from the scene of Solitude - and DIED!' (200-1).
Instead of revenging the maid's death, the hermit can only wait for his
own; the poem deflates its Gothic and romantic force by using
violence to reveal the hero's weakness. Desire, perverted through
violence into violation, provides the raison d'etre for the hermit's
exposure as more of a villain than the soldier. Again switching or
merging roles, as in 'Golfre', Robinson writes for her readers a poem
wherein the heroine is murdered, the hero pines away, and the villain
gets away with his crime. Violence is done, not only to character, but
to genre: the romance is exploded from within.
Robinson's representation of violent death - the maid's murder - is
superseded in the poem, however, by the hermit's withering away, a
far more passive and indirect expiration. By concluding the poem
with the hermit's weakness, she goes some way towards defusing the
violence of the rape and murder. She also builds into the poem's struc-
ture delay and evasion that, like the 30 lines of atmosphere that pad
the poem between the shriek of death and finding the body, functions
to drain suspense and redirect the reader's attention. The poem is 201
lines long; the dark and stormy night begins on line 103. This struc-
tural imbalance contributes to a sense of delay that weakens the
poem's violence: we enter the crucial night just past the half-way
point, and the hermit manages to die just past an even 200 lines. This
unevenness draws out events unnaturally, inorganically; the poem's
lack of symmetry informs both its refusal to conform to romantic
convention and its refusal to portray its violence even-handedly.
Robinson goes further: when 'Hermit' is republished in her collected
works, she has stressed the poem's violence, retitling it The Murdered
Maid' and thus shifting the emphasis from the weak non-hero to the
martyred, victimised heroine. However, she has also removed its most
shocking lines, the direct address to the hermit that make the rape
plain, thus highlighting the erotic picture of the dead maid while
maintaining that body's virginity - and going some way towards
excusing the hermit's inaction. 25

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 115

Robinson's complex strategy of infesting the romance with violence

yet simultaneously avoiding its full force combines with a psycholog-
ical approach in The Lady of the Black Tower'. Here, she exchanges
indirectness, moralising, banality, and weakness - markers of deflated
violence - for a proto-Freudian climax that more effectively eliminates

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the violence than her other techniques combined. For Freud, 'a dream
is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish'; Didier
Anzieu elaborates that 'to understand dreams ... is to repress [the]
lost body [of the mother]', 'the primal place where infantile wishes are
fulfilled'.26 Eighteenth-century dream-analysis was less abstract;
Erasmus Darwin, following Andrew Baxter, concluded that 'in dreams
the power of volition is suspended, we can recollect and compare our
present ideas with none of our acquired knowledge, and are hence
incapable of observing any absurdities in them'. 27 For Freud, those
very absurdities are expressions of desires, disguised or coded; in
Anzieu's explanation, the attempt to rationalise, to observe the absurd-
ities, results in the repression of desires and of wish-fulfilment - in
other words, a species of loss. In this way one can see dreams as enact-
ing or representing desire, and their interpretation - even the
acknowledgement of a dream as a dream - provoking the disappear-
ance or loss of desire. As I have tried to establish, for Robinson (and
Hemans to follow), desire and violence are linked through their repre-
sentation in romance. When dreams also enter, another layer is
added: the dreamed vision becomes both literal and figurative, both
an expression of desire and a negation of it, both representation and
erasure. The 'narrative ... of female powerlessness and of male deceit'
that Ty notes is one of Robinson's favourite plots (417) is exaggerated
and rejected in 'Black Tower"s dream-vision, and overtaken by the
conventional romance when the dream ends.
'Black Tower' opens with a mysterious voice, never identified,
which intones the death of romance:

'Watch no more the twinkling stars;

Watch no more the chalky bourne;
Lady! from the holy wars
Never will thy love return!
Cease to watch, and cease to mourn,
Thy lover never will return!'
(1-6)

From the start, the Lady inhabits a world defined by Gothic mystery

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116 The Romantic Paradox

and the loss of love; she is 'disconsolate in mind' (35) and finds her
appropriate setting in the 'lofty tower ... ivy clad' (37), enlivened only
by 'the midnight bell... toiling for a soul's repose!' (39-40). In a stanza
of 12 lines - twice the length of most of the poem's - Robinson intro-
duces the poem's first horror, suitably garlanded by mystery and fear:

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The lofty tower was ivy clad;
And round a dreary forest rose;
The midnight bell was tolling sad -
Twas toiling for a soul's repose!
The lady heard the gates unclose,
And from her seat in terror rose.
The summer moon shone bright and clear;
She saw the castle gates unclose;
And now she saw four monks appear,
Loud chanting for a soul's repose.
Forbear, oh, lady! look no more -
They pass'd - a livid corpse they bore.
(37-48)

Robinson's repetition of the 'ose' rhyme - rose, repose, unclose, rose,

unclose, repose - embeds a circularity in the stanza, and by extension
the poem itself; interspersed by three individually rhyming couplets,
the repeated words ring with the central mystery: whose soul? which
door? whose corpse? At this point, only seven stanzas in, the Lady is
already trapped in threads of rhyme, a model for a later Lady in a
Tower, similarly caught up in threads. The interwoven rhymes, the
achievement of order and balance through repetition rather than
novelty, allow Robinson to indicate the internal, inward-looking
nature of the Lady's fears, for the four monks later deny carrying any
corpse at all: '"Oh, lady! question us no more:/ No corpse did we bear
down the dale!"/ The Lady sunk upon the floor,/ Her quivering lip was
deathly pale./ The bare-foot monks now whisper'd, sad,/ "God grant
our lady be not mad"' (73-8). While the Lady's castle seems as Gothic
as Goitre's, the monks' whispered concern points to the beginning of
a signal difference: 'Golfre"s Gothic events were accepted unques-
tioningly, while the first one readers witness in 'Black Tower' inspires
suspicions of a hallucinating Lady and the search for a 'rational' ex-
planation of an irrational and supernatural happening.
For the Lady, however, the vision (as it seems to have been) 28 acts
to foreshadow coming horrors: having left the Tower to question the

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 117

monks, the Lady is now in the chapel and at its altar. Suddenly, we
hear once again the disembodied voice, repeating its earlier caution -
'"Lady, all that live must die"' - and bidding her to 'watch no more
from yonder tower' since '"thy lover will no more return!"' (90, 91,
96). Robinson's narrator makes no attempt to explain the voice's

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provenance; indeed, a few lines earlier the narrator has herself parti-
cipated in the suspense-building, apostrophising 'Ah, lady! Thou wilt
pray ere long/ To sleep those lonely aisles among!' (65-6). At this
point, however, the narrator retreats to passive description, so that the
reader shares the Lady's alarm and fear when there suddenly appears
a 'youthful knight' 'clad in a doublet gold and green', who frowns and
repeats mournfully 'all that lives must die' (99, 98, 102). All this time
the Lady has been at the altar, but, with a heart full of 'love and fear',
has been unable to pray: the chapel, empty of monks and the religion
they represent, now houses ghosts and unearthly voices, trading one
belief-system,29 and one vision, for another. The ghostly youth trans-
forms into a 'giant spectre', whose appearance cues the presentation
of five stanzas of ghastly description, centred on the wasting of flesh
and the exchange of youth and love for death and decay:

His flowing robe was long and clear,

His ribs were white as drifted snow:
The lady's heart was chill'd with fear;
She rose, but scarce had power to go:
The spectre grinn'd a dreadful smile,
And walk'd beside her down the aisle.
(109-14)

In a clear parody of marriage, the spectre and the Lady walk together
down the aisle away from the altar, their union sanctioned by the
Gothic atmosphere and cemented when, at the chapel's door, the
spectre conjures up the youth, this time spotted with blood and with
a bloody sword. The summer day darkens, the flesh 'waste [s] away'
from the spectre's cheek, and the monks return, once again to deny
having seen or heard anything strange, and Part One concludes.
Robinson seems to be putting the Gothic to clear romantic use: the
Lady's ceaseless watching for her lover prompts the spirit world to
send her signs both of his love and his demise, so that she may give
up her hopeless waiting. The romance is undermined, however, by the
suggestion that watching and waiting - the romance heroine's tradi-
tional duty - are both useless and harmful. While the mysterious voice

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118 The Romantic Paradox

drives home the utilitarian message that all that lives must die, it has
also enjoined the Lady to '"cease to watch, and cease to mourn ...
Lady, lady, cheerful be"' (11, 30). This opening exhortation blithely
ignores some basic requirements of traditional romance - the happy
ending and the heroine's obligation to love and to mourn lost love -

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and instead encourages forgetfulness and cheerfulness. Robinson
combines the unearthly and the commonsensical in another struc-
tural challenge to the very genre she invokes from the start. Yet that
genre competes with Robinson's innovations: the voice, ghost and
spectre are all, as far as we can tell, 'real', even if only to the Lady, but
the Gothic has never required the verification by independent
witnesses of its truth. Throughout Part One, the Lady experiences
visions that simultaneously assert the foolishness of watching and
waiting and require ever-more-attentive watching and waiting; the
parodic 'marriage' that unites the Lady and the spectre functions, as
in 'Golfre', to bind together those who, by nature and culture, are
unsuitably matched, even as the poem's structure both offers and
rejects romantic convention.
It is no surprise, then, that the Lady is back on the 'lofty tower',
watching and waiting, as Part Two opens. Once again, she sees some-
thing: this time the far less ghastly sight of a ship. Part One had
moved from night to day; Part Two begins in day and moves to the
twilight hour, a traditional Gothic between-time. Again, there is a
voice, 'airy' this time and with a slightly changed message: '"Watch
no more the evening star;/ Watch no more the billowy sea;/ Lady,
from the holy war/ Thy lover hastes to comfort thee:/ Lady, lady, cease
to mourn;/ Soon thy lover will return"' (175-80). The portents of Part
One forgotten, the Lady 'hastens to the bay', and, met by 'smiling
sailors' who tell her (ominously) 'trust us', she sets sail for 'the holy
land/ Never to return again' (181, 183, 185, 201-2). Since in Part One
we learned that the Lady's lover has been at the 'holy wars', it makes
sense that she journeys to 'the holy land', 30 but the smiling sailors
have other plans: again a voice, Tow' this time, speaks, and describes
the boat filling with water and beginning to sink; the Lady again sees
the knight in gold and green, but this time 'from the sockets of his
eyes,/ A pale and streaming light she spies!/ And now his form trans-
parent stood,/ Smiling with a ghastly mien/ ... / ... "Deeper, deeper,"
sang the crew' (215-18, 222). Despite the waves and the crew's song,
the boat lands on 'holy land', significant in its loss of the definite
article: 'the holy land' denotes a country, while 'holy land' intimates
something more local - a church, or a crypt. The castle the Lady is

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 119

conducted to belongs to a 'lord' in gold and green, who leads her to a

scene of Gothic horror and implied violence, and needs quoting in full:

He led her through the Gothic hall,

With bones and skulls encircled round;

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'Oh, let not this thy soul appal!'
He cried, 'for this is holy ground.' 31
He led her through the chambers lone,
'Mid many a shriek and many a groan.

Now to the banquet-room they came:

Around a table of black stone
She mark'd a faint and vapoury flame;
Upon the horrid feast it shone -
And there, to close the maddening sight,
Unnumber'd spectres met the light.

Their teeth were like the brilliant, bright;

Their eyes were blue as sapphire clear;
Their bones were of a polish'd white;
Gigantic did their ribs appear!
And now the knight the lady led,
And placed her at the table's head!
(241-58)

Whereas Robinson's other Gothic romances have portrayed violent

acts, 'Black Tower' illustrates a more metaphorical violence: disorder,
madness, the natural progression of life, death and decay reversed.
The Lady follows a path from love, through desire, to horror and
insanity; her place at the head of the table of death signifies both the
satisfaction, and the monstrousness, of her desires. By ignoring the
first voice's unconventional direction to forget and be happy, by
maintaining her heroine's stance and in this way displaying her
unbending desire for her lover's return, the Lady finds herself
rewarded by marriage with Death.
Horrific as the scene is, the image of the Lady and Death does not
close the poem; Robinson pulls back from the moment of direct
engagement with the violence of horror, to reveal that it had all been
a dream: 'Just now the lady woke: - for she/ Had slept upon the lofty
tower' (259-60). The entire poem - voices, corpses, monks, ghosts, the
journey - has been the Lady's dream, caused, it is implied, by sleeping

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120 The Romantic Paradox

in the open, under the moon: by tradition (again), moonlight and

strange dreams are associated. Moreover, the Lady now hears a 'real
voice', Robinson's emphasis serving to establish the unreality of the
previous 41 stanzas, and finds that her lover has returned: 'for he,/ To
calm her bosom's rending fears,/ That night had cross'd the stormy

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sea:/ "I come," said he, "from Palestine,/ To prove myself, sweet lady,
thine"' (266-70). A thoroughly romantic ending undermines the
quiddities that have made up the poem's body; as Clery phrases it,
'the previous meltdown or reification by fear is superseded by moral
hypostasis' (82). The outrageous Gothicism of the poem, its challenges
to convention and to representation, are checkmated by the final two
stanzas, as reality and nature reassert themselves. Once again,
Robinson deflates her own violent force.
And yet, remembering the significance of dreams, their connection
to unspoken, even unspeakable desires, and their tendencies to hide
meaning once threatened with interpretation, 'Black Tower' offers
more than simply a self-defeating mechanism of retreat. The Lady's
dream fulfils Darwin's and Baxter's directives that in dreams the
comparative ability is lost: the Lady finds nothing strange about her
dream while she is dreaming it. 32 Further, it illustrates desire on
several levels: desire for her lover; for autonomy; for freedom of
choice; even, in her place at the table's head, for power and mastery.
None of these are allowed expression in the standard romance; all
point to Robinson's own desire to represent, give voice to, her Lady's
thoughts, since the mysterious voices, as well as the horrific images,
must all emanate from the Lady's psyche. The monks' whispered hope
that their Lady is not mad is also the Lady's own; as if subtextually
aware of the unnaturalness, the irrationality, of her impulses in the
world of the romance, she clothes the expression of those impulses -
those desires - in supernatural, Gothic, violent garb. She locates the
fulfilment of her desires in the tomb, the holy land that welcomes and
imprisons her desiring self. Significantly, she also kills off her lover in
her dream, indicating his peripheral unimportance. The dream can
only enact the Lady's desires, however, as long as we do not know it
is a dream; Robinson postpones this revelation and this allows the
force of the Lady's visions to reveal the force of her desires. Once the
visions are acknowledged as a dream, the force dissipates in the banal-
ity of its own resolution, and we re-enter the world of the romance,
dominated by the happy ending, the substitution of the hero's voice,
the declaration of the hero's desires. The dream is shown up as a
dream - unreal, imagined, transient, the natural order is reaffirmed,

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 121

and the dream's significance vanishes, repressed, along with the Lady.
Of Robinson's Gothic poetic romances, 'Black Tower' is the only one
to maintain the happy ending, 33 and yet it presents the most unease
with the needs and requirements of the romance.

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Love w i t h death: Felicia Hemans

In 'An Hour of Romance', one of the 'Miscellaneous Pieces' from her

1828 collection Records of Woman, Hemans describes the 'magic page
wherein I read/ Of royal chivalry and old renown': the speaker, having
retreated to an isolated bower, seizes a chance moment to enslave
herself willingly to 'the spell/ Breathing from that high gorgeous
tale'. 34 Romance is deliberately textualised in the poem; the speaker
reads, and loses herself in the visions imaged by the text.
Interestingly, however, the romance thus enjoyed is not one of love -
the suitable text, one would think, for the poet of the domestic affec-
tions 35 - but rather one of war, a 'tale of Palestine'. The speaker loses
herself in the sights and sounds of battle: trumpets, lances and spears,
the Saracen's tent, the harps of English bards. The fantasy is broken
only by 'a voice of happy childhood' that pulls her back to 'life's worn
track', and, lest the reader question the propriety of the reading matter
or, indeed, the workaday imagery of life ('worn': tired, old, used, drab,
unexciting; 'track': homely, isolated, rough), the speaker ends the
poem by asserting 'yet might I scarce bewail the splendours gone,/ My
heart so leap'd to that sweet laughter's tone' (43-4). Romance is rele-
gated to the imagination, while reality is invested with a sweetness no
book can ever hold. A straightforward reading of 'An Hour of
Romance' confirms the poet's conservative, domestic ideology: escape
is limited to an hour, to a book; it is only marginally permissible; the
duties of caring for children carry joys of which the imagination is
barren. In fact, the speaker celebrates her interruption, proving as it
does her overwhelming attachment to 'life's worn track' and to
women's 'proper and natural business [ - ] the practical regulation of
private life, in all its bearings, affections, and concerns'. 36 Romance
nurtures an attachment to the domestic by providing an opportunity
to re-enter - gladly - domestic affections.
And yet, the romance scenario that has stolen even an hour of the
speaker's attention is not, as I noted above, itself a reification of
domestic ideology. The speaker thrills to a scene of violence, or at least
its preparations; the romance thus indulged is that which relies on
death even as its removal to the distant past allows for the enjoyment

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122 The Romantic Paradox

of its martial energy. This reader, feminised in location (a bower), by

association (with Hemans) and by occupation (a childminder), finds
her soul 'chain'd' by a tale of high chivalry as violent as any anathem-
atised by the anxious readers of the 1780s and 1790s. Even if only
temporarily, Hemans trades her reality of femininity for a fantasy of

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masculinity, at least in the observation, and she displays, briefly, a
complicated relationship with the romance that, by 1828, results in
the concoction of murder, suicide, betrayal and abandonment that
makes up Records of Woman. Hemans's 'remarkable fondness for ...
warlike pomp and knightly pageantry' 37 finds play in her repeated
visitations to the land of romance, her superficial complicity in its
generic and gendered requirements, and her Robinsonian predilection
for denouements resplendent with violence and the death of men. As
Paula Feldman notes, 'Records of Woman is a strong feminist work,
[but] its ironies and subversions were subtle, for Hemans literally
could not afford to alienate any major segment of her buying
public'. 38 However, as an intelligent and imaginative poet who desired
to write 'important' poetry - that is, 'high' rather than 'popular' art -
she constructs her romances around situations in which loss and
disruption were inevitable; as critics have noted, her continual replay
of the destruction of domestic affections 'reminds us of the fragility of
the very domestic ideology [her poetry] endorses' (Mellor 124). But
while readers of Hemans have variously praised and condemned her
for her allegiance to, or exposure of, the limitations of domestic ideo-
logy, none have discussed her strategies in the context of the genre
she discreetly, but knowingly, parodies - the romance. Her manipula-
tions of its requirements of duty, fidelity, honour and love in Records
of Woman result in a collection of poems that, far from displaying a
'total absorption ... by values that appear ... patently hostile to
women's individual identity and destructive of any intrinsic signifi-
cance their lives may have' (Harding 140), instead reconstruct
romance so that the violence it does is revealed in the violence she
poeticises, and individuality is repeatedly shown to be the point,
rather than the sacrifice, of her vignettes.
Hemans, like Robinson, distrusts romantic convention, and her
Records violently overthrow its dominance in her characters' lives.
Unlike Robinson, however, Hemans writes not the Gothic, but
'records'; that is, she imports an authority, a reality based on docu-
mentation and history, that replaces Robinson's dramas of spectres,
prophecies and dreams. Again unlike Robinson, Hemans poeticises
scenes of violence and torture without flinching and without a self-

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 123

imposed avoidance, if also without the Gothicised horror of buckets

of blood. Hemans's 'pageantry' of women's experiences focuses on
moments of highly romanticised, occasionally even theatrical, desire
and loss; she documents crises of love and betrayal. Presenting 'the
Spirit of romance and chivalry ... in a female form', 39 she seems to

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glorify feminine self-sacrifice and allegiance to love above all, but her
very fluency in such uncomplicated roles, her 'articulation of the
value system' (Wolfson 130) masks her translation of stability into
flux, of romance into its obverse. Writing in decades with increasingly
rigid expectations of what a woman could, and should, write, Hemans
shows her understanding of her textual parameters in the methods by
which 'her poetry ... destabilizes, darkens, or even contests the social
structures' of domestic and romantic values (Wolfson 130).40 Instead
of disguising her violent distortions of romance, as Robinson does, she
openly portrays its destruction, performing a sleight-of-hand man-
oeuvre that seems to maintain the existence of that it has just
exploded. Indeed, rather than passively reflecting early Victorian
ideology with 'women characters [who] are no longer ambitious or
powerful' (Eubanks 354), Hemans rejects such characterisation, using
the disruption of romance to signify another form of desire: for female
autonomy and freedom from the trappings of the ideology of romance.
Records of Woman thus functions as a protest demurely clothed in
the affections promoted by the domestic, an hour wherein the
romance of convention is subtly exchanged for a competing version
of femaleness. It is part of Hemans's strategy of concealment that her
version of domesticity 'inexorably demands violence and death as its
perfect tribute' (Harding 139), not in the service of effacement as
Harding contends, but literally as its inevitable corollary. 'Death
virtually becomes a kind of guarantee of the significance of a life'
(Harding 138) not because death functions as the ultimate form of
self-sacrifice, but because, in its various violent forms, it acts to free
Hemans's women from the constraints of conventional romance.
Death enables the expression of desires; its frequent deployment in
Records of Woman illustrates Hemans's dissatisfaction with the roles
and relationships mandated by the romance. And this goes beyond a
dramatisation of the fragilities of domestic ideology that Mellor
describes; it involves an exploration, and rejection, of the politics of
romance, the genre most deeply implicated in the establishment and
maintenance of the domestic ideology. Hemans poeticises, and in so
doing extends Robinson's vision of, the impossibility of romantic
love; her vehicle is death.

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124 The Romantic Paradox

Records of Woman devises a number of permutations on the themes

of Love and Death, liberally sprinkled with 'wo'. Luhmann's 'incom-
municability' finds play in Hemans's repeated scenarios of disrupted
love, interrupted love, rejected love, and thwarted love - as Mellor
notes, 'in Records of Woman, almost all of Hemans's heroines are either

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separated from those they love, or express a love that is unrequited'
(132, Mellor's emphasis). Love and romance, while on the one hand
the necessary conditions for life, on the other symbolise the loss of
life, the triumph of death. Hemans was sometimes celebrated, some-
times criticised for her poetic preoccupation with melancholy, for
'dwelling on what was painful and depressing'; 41 as with Robinson,
the circumstances of her life provided 'reasons' for her poetic subject-
matter for her readers. 42 An expectation that her poetry will concern
itself with loss and sadness, however, does not prepare a reader for
Records of Woman, 'awash with blood', as Norma Clarke describes it
(79). 'Marriage [or the decision to marry] [is always] followed by
death' (Clarke 79): the romantic solution provides ample opportuni-
ties for the violent expulsion of romance. 'Where love is fractured by
violence and subjectivity is an unstable and threatening arena, a keen
and painful listening to the conflicting pasts and languages which
constitute Woman seems an obvious and difficult imperative', writes
Kadiatu Kanneh. 43 Hemans's Records of Woman concerns itself exclu-
sively with the 'pasts and languages which constitute Woman'; her
poems dramatise moments of crisis and instability wherein subjectiv-
ity is tested and re-evaluated. Structured around familiar,
conventional love scenarios, Hemans writes into her Records a
retelling of the romance in which she alerts her readers not merely to
the 'fragility' of a domestic ideology based on love and romance
(Mellor 124), but to its undesirability, even to its impossibility. In her
poems, she records romances that fail, that end baldly, that reject
their own generic codes, and that, finally, collapse altogether to
reform around the reassuring and boundless love of a mother for her
daughter. This rewriting depends on - indeed, presupposes - the death
or absence of the man, whose heroism is fatally compromised by his
inability to survive the demands of the romance. As Clarke notices,
Records of Woman is 'eloquently empty of adequate men' (76); what
she and other critics of Hemans fail to remark are the ensuing cracks
and fissures in the believability, the reliability, of the romance. Its
structural move from rupture to resolution is reversed, as one after
another Hemans's women are confronted with the bleeding corpse of
their Beloved.

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 125

However, Hemans opens Records of Woman gently; 'Arabella Stuart',

accomplished in its rendering of the psychological disintegration of a
heroine imprisoned, both metaphorically and literally, by love,
records the failure of romance through scenes singularly devoid of
violence. Instead, Arabella records her fears and insecurities about the

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enduring power of love - not her own, but Seymour's, her husband.
Married before the poem opens, and thus already in a state of roman-
tic fulfilment, Arabella learns that true love does not conquer all; in
fact, she begins to doubt the truth of love itself, and it is in this fear
that the violence of 'Arabella Stuart' is most transgressive. After an
unsuccessful escape attempt, in which Seymour misses her boat but
ensures his own freedom, Arabella, back in prison, begins to play out
the course of love in a series of apostrophes to Seymour: at first she
rejoices that 'thou hast rent the heavy chain that bound thee;/ And
this shall be my strength/ ... /Thy bonds are broken,/ And unto me,
I know, thy true love's token/ Shall one day be deliverance' (117-18,
122-4). Constrained by the situation to watch and wait, Arabella has
no disembodied voice to encourage her to reject such passivity;
indeed, Hemans's commitment to historic veracity allows her to solid-
ify Arabella's constricting belief in romantic rescue into an actual jail.
However, even as the voice in 'Black Tower' proved to originate in the
Lady herself, so too Hemans allows Arabella a muted but increasingly
angry interrogation of the absent Seymour, and with it a subtle
dismantling of the framework of romantic fulfilment. 'My friend, my
friend! Where art thou? Day by day/ Gliding, like some dark mourn-
ful stream, away,/ My silent youth flows from me' (126-8), she
laments, comparing herself to a stricken deer.44 Arabella voices a
dawning distrust of Seymour's honesty as hero, disguised as despair at
her loss of the attributes of the heroine - youth, and by extension,
beauty. Once the romance fractures, however, it quickly breaks: 'Dost
thou forget me, Seymour? I am prov'd/ So long, so sternly! Seymour,
my belov'd!/ There are such tales of holy marvels done/ By strong
affection, of deliverance won/ Thro' its prevailing power/ ... / ... /
Dost thou forget me in my hope's decay?' (160-4, 167). Invoking
romantic precedent, Arabella simultaneously questions Seymour's
commitment to his romantic duty even as she asserts her own, and
yet, in describing her 'hope's decay', she begins also to inscribe her
disillusionment with the trappings of genre.
From this point to the poem's end, Arabella advances through stages
of anger, accusation, and a form of madness that sees her call on heaven
with 'the voice of blood' 45 and declare the utter failure of romantic love:

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126 The Romantic Paradox

Thou hast forsaken me! I feel, I know,

There would be rescue if this were not so.
Thou'rt at the chase, thou'rt at the festive board,
Thou'rt where the red wine free and high is pour'd,
Thou'rt where the dancers meet! — A magic glass

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Is set within my soul, and proud shapes pass,
Flushing it o'er with pomp from bower and hall; -
I see one shadow, stateliest there of all, -
Thinel — What dost thou amidst the bright and fair,
Whispering light words, and mocking my despair?
It is not well of thee! — my love was more
Than fiery song may breathe, deep thought explore;
And there thou smilest while my heart is dying,
With all its blighted hopes around it lying;
Ev'n thou, on whom they hung their last green leaf -
Yet smile, smile on! Too bright art thou for grief.
(184-99)

Arabella renounces all faith in romantic convention, and the next

lines conjure up Death as the only substitute lover. A violent reaction
against love, her representation of Seymour's perfidy relies on a
romantic construction of the world, where heroism automatically
results in the rescue of a fair maid. Finding herself still imprisoned,
Arabella can only explain this by recasting Seymour as villain, as false
hero, but even as she does this she demonstrates the limitations of
romance. Arabella is a romance heroine in situation and in self-regard,
but she is also an historical figure whose 'romantic' imprisonment
references political strategy. Although Arabella can only see herself in
romantic terms, Hemans writes into the failure of her romance the
failure of Romance to sustain female desire - in this poem, as much for
Liberty as for Love. That Seymour is entirely absent except in
Arabella's thoughts emphasises his place on the periphery; while
Arabella relies on a romanticised view of her own 'wo' that 'may one
day flow/ To thy heart's holy place' (256, 257-8), thereby allowing a
reunion beyond the grave, Seymour is totally removed from partici-
pation in this vision.
By illustrating Arabella's dependence on romance even unto death,
Hemans begins to deconstruct its hold on life; 'Costanza' reinforces
both Hemans's discomfort with female self-sacrifice and disbelief in
the possibility of male endurance. Contrary to Mellor's assertion that
'Hemans idealizes the woman who is committed above all to an

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 127

enduring love' (131), this poem establishes Hemans's unease with

idealising female endurance. Costanza, rejected in love, dedicates her
life to prayer and to indulging in 'wo'; her 'blighted years,/ And
wasted love, and vainly bitter tears' are confided in 'heaven alone'
(15-16 ). Costanza, whose name resonates with 'constancy', 46 person-

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ifies a single-minded dedication to lost love, an adoration of romance
that threatens to destabilise her reputation as a 'gentle saint' (1. 18).47
It is due to that reputation that the dying participant in a battle that
has left 'blood on the grass' (1. 46) is brought to her hut; Hemans
devotes some lines to a lingering appraisal of the injured male body:
its 'raven locks ... Steep'd in bloody showers', shuttered eyes, parted
lips, 'white hue', and 'scarr'd forehead' (66, 68, 73, 75). Again,
Hemans pays lip service to the romance while undermining its tenets,
for unsurprisingly the warrior is discovered to be the same who
deserted Costanza for 'hollow splendour' (100),48 and his desire to be
forgiven is answered by Costanza's unveiling of both her face and her
heart: T live/ To say my heart hath bled, and can forgive' (111-12,
emphasis added ). The substitution of 'and' for a more grammatically
expected 'but' entails forgiveness as conditional on a bleeding heart:
the woman must suffer in order to fulfil what should be 'natural' to
her. Moreover, her years of waiting bring her neither peace nor reward:

But o'er his frame

Too fast the strong tide rush'd — the sudden shame,
The joy, th'amaze! — he bow'd his head — it fell
On the wrong'd bosom which had lov'd so well;
And love still perfect, gave him refuge there, -
His last faint breath just wav'd her floating hair.
(115-20)

Far from idealising Costanza's endurance, Hemans portrays it as

deadly, fatal to the man and harmful to Costanza. She is not rewarded
for her constancy, unless we read the poem against itself and see her
reward take the form of revenge - such an interpretation satisfies the
requirements of the anti-romance and of 'dark' Hemans. The similar
climax of The Peasant Girl of the Rhone', where years of constancy to
a dead hero result in nothing other than the girl's agony, again illu-
minates the emptiness of romance.
Hemans moves from failed romances to violently ruptured ones in
Tmelda' and The Bride of the Greek Isle'. In both these poems, the
man is swiftly and bloodily dispatched in scenes reminiscent of The

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128 The Romantic Paradox

Doublet of Grey' and 'Golfre'. The Bride celebrates her wedding-day

with torrents of tears, first at leaving the parental home, and then at
losing her new husband to brigands' violence:

She saw but Ianthis before her lie,

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With the blood from his breast in a gushing flow,
Like a child's large tears in its hour of wo 49

She knelt down beside him, her arms she wound,

Like tendrils, his drooping neck around,
As if the passion of that fond grasp
Might chain in life with its ivy-clasp

So clos'd the triumph of youth and love!

(140-2, 145-8, 154)

Again, youth and love are overpowered by violence, and again

Hemans's ambivalence expresses itself in her less-than-idealising
description of Eudora's clinging tendril-clasp: she simultaneously
portrays Eudora as fighting against Ianthis's death and contributing
towards it, the gentle yet inexorable violence of her ivy-clasp threat-
ening in itself. Captured and taken aboard the brigands' ship, Eudora
finds her revenge in arson, setting fire to the ship and herself in what
Tricia Lootens calls 'an evocation of suttee' that also sees the bride
'stand as a torch to marital misery, an embodiment of pre-emptive
self-sacrifice'.50 Hemans destroys the romance from within; as 'night
gathers o'er youth and love' (1. 226) readers are reminded forcibly of
the hero's failure to protect his heroine, or even to survive, and the
heroine's deadly dedication to romantic ideals of self-sacrifice.
Hemans writes this self-sacrifice as itself heroic, a 'battle against the
spiritual death of man's inadequacy' (Clarke 80), but cannot reward
Eudora51 - the romance climaxes in the violent destruction of its
players, a theme she returns to in 'Imelda'. Opening with a Romeo and
Juliet scenario of lovers defying their families' mutual hatred, Tmelda'
abruptly terminates its initial romantic storyline with a long dash and
the narrator's apostrophe: ' — What reck'd their souls of strife/
Between their fathers?' (21-2). Interrupted by 'the footstep of her
brother's wrath' (31), Imelda hurries away, pausing briefly at the
sound of 'the clash of swords' (34). As in The Doublet of Grey',
'Golfre', or indeed Keats's 'Isabella', Imelda's romantic attachment
serves only to enrage her male relatives and, thus, to prefigure its own

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 129

elimination. Imelda returns to the fountain-side to find bloodied

water and her lover, Azzo, 'graceful' even in death (78). As in
'Costanza', Hemans invites the objectification of the dead man,
dwelling on the details of his 'blood ... cold cheek ... [and] moveless
lip' (81, 82). Imelda no sooner sees Death than she sees its instrument,

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her brother's sword, with its 'venom'd point' (94). Proving that 'love is
strong' even in 'wo', Imelda 'pressfes]/ Her lips of glowing life to Azzo's
breast,/ Drawing the poison forth', and dies (95, 99-101). 52 The
morning finds 'two fair forms laid/ Like sculptured sleepers' (107-8).
Their long kiss goodnight has been sanctified by poison, and the
potential illegitimacy of their premarital shared bed obviated by death.
Romance sustains itself only at the expense of its players; Hemans uses
blood to bind her lovers, and in so doing fuses love and death.
Tmelda' closes with the ambiguous epithet that 'Love with true
heart had striven - but Death had won' (1. 124). We are invited to read
'love', 'true heart', and 'death' all as adversaries, which raises the
possibility that Death functions not to prolong Love, but to terminate
it. In 'Gertrude' and to a lesser extent 'Juana', Hemans continues to
prop her romance on the body of a dead man, but in these poems she
leaves the woman's fate open. Juana, the 'neglected wife' of Philip the
Handsome, cannot accept his death and so watches over the corpse,
waiting for it to awake and return her love:

But when thou wak'st, my prince, my lord! And hear'st how I have kept
A lonely vigil by thy side, and o'er thee pray'd and wept;
How in one long, deep dream of thee my nights and days have past,
Surely that humble, patient love must win back love at last!
(29-32)

Juana, like Arabella, like Costanza, relies on a romantic construct that

presupposes the rewards of virtue; she believes in love to the point of
denying death. Her vigil lasts 'until the shadows of the grave had
swept o'er every grace,/ Left midst the awfulness of death on the
princely form and face' (47-8). Faced with the decomposing body of
her husband, Juana exchanges its decay for the Tone despair' of a
'broken heart' (52). While this certainly dramatises 'the lasting
commitment of a woman to her chosen mate', does it 'celebrate' such
endurance (Mellor 124)? Juana's commitment to a decaying corpse
exposes her as less a dutiful wife than a maniac one, her need for
requited love such that she would rather be companion to such
horrors than husbandless. This seems less a celebration than a critique

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130 The Romantic Paradox

of Juana's single-minded loyalty, a critique based on the decomposi-

tion and devaluation of romantic ideology and the devolution of
domestic affections. Again, love and death coexist, since it is only
Philip's death that allows Juana to express her love. Not even love,
however, can retard the processes of death. In her total commitment

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to her duties and identity as 'wife', Juana exposes unwittingly the
ghastly limitations of an ideology based on love. Hemans, in writing
'Juana', begins to map out an escape route from Romance itself.
In 'Gertrude' we find what seems to be the purest expression of
romantic love and commitment in Records of Woman. Subtitled
'Fidelity till Death', it opens with an epigraph from Joanna Baillie:

Dark lowers our fate,

And terrible the storm that gathers o'er us;
But nothing, till that latest agony
Which severs thee from nature, shall unloose
This fix'd and sacred hold. In thy dark prison-house,
In the terrific face of armed law,
Yea, on the scaffold, if it needs must be,
I never will forsake thee.

'Gertrude' dramatises wifely duty: Gertrude 'will not leave' (16) her
husband in his final hour, and forsakes the domestic space for a spec-
tacular position at the foot of the wheel on which her husband is
bound. In what is by now a familiar scene in Records of Woman,
Rudolph, the husband, is physically weakened and, soon to die, is
tangential to the romance; Gertrude, attending him 'with the most
heroic devotedness' (Records of Woman 55, headnote to 'Gertrude'), is
both heroine and hero. Gertrude proves her wifely devotion by
staying with Rudolph until 'his worn spirit pass'd'; content with 'her
meed — one smile in death -', Gertrude embodies 'Love and Faith,/
Enduring to the last!' (52, 51, 49-50). In 'Gertrude', love and death
again meet, troped by the man's dead body; like Juana, Gertrude
survives past the romantic disaster of the death of love, and neatly,
almost patly, exemplifies 'fidelity'. But it is in the poem's subtitle and
epigraph that romantic fissures appear. Gertrude, like Juana, appar-
ently has no existence after the death of her husband; the poem ends
as she thanks God for the strength that allowed her to brave the public
eye. If traditional romance is meant to end with 'happily ever after',
however, what comes next? Built into the poem's framework is the
suggestion that Gertrude has performed a duty that has a specific

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 131

ending point: 'fidelity till death', not 'past' or 'beyond' death. The
Baillie epigraph reinforces this: 'nothing, till that latest agony,/ Which
severs thee from nature, shall unloose this fix'd and sacred hold'. 53 Both
subtitle and epigraph posit a limitation on fidelity and love; both
identify death as the moment which sees the evaporation, the loosing

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of romanticised concepts of constancy. In 'Gertrude', love and duty
merge: Gertrude's duty to Rudolph is her love, but it is a love and duty
dependent on circumstance, a condition of Gertrude's identity as wife
and Rudolph's presence as her husband. Only death can disengage the
fixed and sacred hold of dutiful 'earthly love' (8), but equally power-
ful is the implicit suggestion that only life can maintain that fixed
hold. Hemans thus underpins her romantic vignettes with unsettling
rejections of its codes and with repeated assaults on its probity. 54 In
'paus[ing] over the seemingly inescapable social fate of women to
suffer and endure' (Wolfson 140), and in binding this fate so tightly
to failed romances, Hemans shades her public allegiance to the domes-
tic affections with a stubborn disbelief in their viability and a
disinclination to retreat to its comforts. Yet, always remembering that
she wrote for money and hence had to please her reading audience,
Hemans is discreet in her attacks and subtle in her exposes; her
romances with their contradictory market-appeal correlate with W.M.
Rossetti's description of Hemans as 'odd' because she 'wore a veil on
her head, like no one else' (in Eubanks 356). Records of Woman, too,
wears a veil.
However, Records does not reject romance entirely. Indeed, it
becomes plain that Hemans primarily reserves violence and death for
her male characters; of the poems I have discussed so far, only Seymour
in 'Arabella Stuart' escapes with his life, mainly because he is never
present to start with. In killing off so many men, Hemans conveys her
disillusionment with a romance based on romantic love. 'Madeline',
however, interestingly repositions romantic roles to allow for a 'happy
ever after' conclusion even though the man has, as usual, been killed
off, this time through succumbing to fever. Opening with another
Baillie epigraph that identifies 'mother' as the one reliable figure in a
world of sickness and wretchedness, the poem gives its first 24 lines to
Madeline's mother: 'My child, my child, thou leav'st me!' (1).
Madeline, like Eudora, leaves her maternal home to take up her duties
as a wife in 'the youthful world' (43) - that is, the new world, America,
but also the world of youth. The mother's blessing foreshadows
Madeline's experience; lines 14-15 call on 'Love' to 'guard' Madeline,
'and the exile's wo/ From thy young heart be far!' (14-15). Almost as if

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132 The Romantic Paradox

the mother's blessing has been a curse in disguise, Madeline no sooner

reaches the new world than the narrator interjects doom:

- Alas! We trace
The map of our own paths, and long ere years

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With their dull steps the brilliant lines efface,
On sweeps the storm, and blots them out with tears.
That home was darken'd soon: the summer breeze
Welcom'd with death the wanderers from the seas,
Death unto one, and anguish - how forlorn!
To her, that widow'd sat in her marriage-morn...
(47-54)

The husband has proved his incapability; Madeline's physical strength

secures her health. Left alone, however, her emotional fragility leads
to literal homesickness: 'at last she lay/ On her lone couch of sickness,
lost in dreams/ Of the gay vineyards and blue-rushing streams/ In her
own sunny land, and murmuring oft/ Familiar names' (70-4).
Madeline pines away, lost in her desires for, not husband, but the
childhood home where safety, security and love were supplied by the
mother, and Hemans obliges by sending that mother to the rescue:
'had she come,/ Thus in life's evening, from her distant home,/ To save
her child? - Ev'n so' (91-3, Hemans's emphasis). Madeline's mother
performs the hero's part, rescuing the damsel in distress from her own
memories and frustrated desires, and Madeline recovers, exclaiming
Take back thy wanderer from this fatal shore,/ Peace shall be ours
beneath our vines once more' (101-2). Records of Woman has at last
furnished a happy ending, but can only do so by realigning romantic
love and recasting its players as mother and daughter. That Madeline
calls herself a 'wanderer' confirms the poem's ethos that to leave the
maternal home, even for the marital one, is to stray - it is and always
was going to be a misdirected journey.
Hemans's own love for her mother, and her sense of loss and depri-
vation when her mother died in 1827 (the year before Records of
Woman was published) is well-documented and was a feature of her
public femininity; Mellor calls it a 'passionate love' (230, n. 37), while
Rossetti remarked that, for Hemans, the 'affections of mother and
daughter were more dominant and vivid ... than conjugal love' (in
Wolf son 139). Records of Woman celebrates the intensity of the
mother-daughter bond in other poems, although without the same
successful resolution: The Memorial Pillar' sanctifies the moment of

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 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson and Hemans 133

parting but ends hopefully with the lines 'Mother & child! - Your tears
are past - / Surely your hearts have met at least!' (60-1). 'Pauline' is
like 'Madeline' in that the mother, Pauline, goes to the rescue of her
daughter when their manor catches fire, but unlike 'Madeline' the
attempt is unsuccessful; both die, and the only memorial is the minia-

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ture of Bertha, the daughter, worn by Pauline - a romantically tragic
ending. 55 In 'Madeline', however, Hemans constructs a familiar love
triangle and shows her allegiance in whom she allows to win
Madeline; in what Wolfson calls 'a fantasy of restoration' (139) the
primacy of mother-daughter love is established, assisted by the weak-
ness and insubstantiality of the male hero. Indeed, considering
Madeline's plea to be re-received into the maternal sphere, the hero
almost comes to seem the villain of the piece, he who tempted
Madeline away and then deserted her. Despite Harding's claim that
'the whole point of this "domestic tale" is that individuality is sacri-
ficed to the mother-daughter relationship' (140), 'Madeline' actually
encourages its readers to substitute a family romance, guaranteed to
succeed, for the fraught, violent, and death-plagued male-female
romance that, in Records of Woman, inevitably leads to 'wo'. Hemans
sacrifices, not female individuality, but the male body, rewriting the
romance as hero-less, exposing its inadequacies, and advocating a
return to 'domestic' love. In writing of Mary Wollstonecraft, Laurie
Langbauer says that 'the mother is double. She is both outside and
inside romance'. 56 Records of Woman asserts a similar line: while
'mother' may be outside traditional romantic conclusions, she is
nonetheless vital to successful romantic conclusions. The romance of
home is most potent of all, and the only one that assures happiness.
The 'subtle ideologies of the romance plot', 57 as manipulated by
Hemans, are reversed; sexual union is displaced, and woman's ulti-
mate happiness and fulfilment can only be found if the romance is
unclosed, or rather, re-opened, rewritten, and re-sexed. Mellor argues
that 'Hemans's poetry subtly and painfully explore[s] the ways in
which [the social] construction of gender finally collapses upon itself,
bringing nothing but suffering, and the void of nothingness, to both
women and men' (142). Records of Woman reveals the collapse of
romance as well, but also offers a solution: return romance to the
maternal home and avoid 'the mysteries of ... wo' ('Pauline', 90).
The discomfort and unease - even horror - that underpin the romances
of both Robinson and Hemans suggest that neither could be said to
support or uphold a romantic ideology which bound together women
and men with promises based on desire rather than experience. That

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134 The Romantic Paradox

neither poet was 'successful' in romantic love might be put forward as

the reason - after all, Robinson was frequently publicly humiliated by
love, and Hemans found security not with her husband but with her
mother. It would not be difficult to cast both poets as heroines of their
own romantic visions; Robinson could even participate in such iden-

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tifications, taking the role of heroine implicitly (as in her Memoirs)
and explicitly (as Perdita to the Prince of Wales's Florizel). Indeed, for
Robinson romance could only culminate in loss and, at the least,
violence to her reputation. It is possible to read her Gothic poems as
mini revenge-dramas, where hero merges with villain and is suitably
punished. Similarly, Hemans's could be read as advertisements for the
rejection of marriage by the abandoned wife, leading as they all do to
sorrow and loss. But this approach gets us only so far; neither poet is
a one-dimensional 'woman scorned', and for both, poetry flourishes
outside the realms of biographical wish-fulfilment. Instead, Robinson
and Hemans write romances in which romance itself - as an ideology,
as a lifestyle - is shown to be corrupt, where reliance on romantic love
leads only to catastrophe, and where the violence suffered, by women
and men, reveals the emptiness of behavioural stereotypes. True love
does not conquer all; the prince will never come, no matter how many
'somedays' there are; hero and villain are not so easy to distinguish;
the hero will not protect you; self-sacrifice is all too often literal.
Robinson's violence is expressed though fantasy, Hemans's through
historicised scenes of 'wo', but for each the violence masks desire
which is itself masked. The many dead men do not evince a desire to
kill men, but a desire to kill off stereotypes of behaviour that harm
both sexes; mainly, the violence figures the desire to destroy romance.
For both poets, the romance is itself synonymous with violence, and
by destroying, defying, avoiding and rewriting it they communicate
their dissatisfaction with a genre thought most appealing to women as
writers and as readers. By interrupting the romantic trajectory,
Robinson and Hemans redirect its energies, and the resulting storm of
emotions can only be voiced violently. Yet, although the romances of
Robinson and Hemans are explosive and revelatory, they are also
sterile: if male-female congress can never be successful, if the only
true romance is found with the mother, then 'ever after' stops here. As
long as the romance is false, it will destroy its own meaning. The final
chapter explores the violence that infuses gendered relations when
the only alternative to romance is murder.

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5
Transforming the Romance: the
Murderous Worlds of Byron and

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Landon

Byron's early poem T o Romance' (1806/7) offers an interesting

countertone to Southey's address of 1792 that opened this volume.
In it, the self-styled 'infant Bard' makes repeated attempts to 'break
the fetters of my youth' and 'leave [Romance's] realms for those of
Truth'. 1 Where Southey accusingly came to recognise Romance's
'true' character - 'Romance! I know thee well' - Byron presents
himself as not only already fully aware of Romance's falseness, but
eager to quit 'her' treacherous, hypocritical sway. 'Romance!
disgusted with deceit,/ Far from thy motley court I fly' (33-4): the
poet casts Romance as a romantic seductress, a villainess whose
attractions still remain strangely compelling. Indeed, although the
speaker declares his intention to quit Romance in stanza 1, as early
as stanza 2 he admits his difficulty, even as he offers his first
critique of 'her' powers: 'And, yet, 'tis hard to quit the dreams,/
Which haunt the unsuspicious soul,/ Where every nymph a
goddess seems,/ Whose eyes through rays immortal roll;/ /
When Virgins seem no longer vain,/ And even Woman's smiles are
true' (9-12, 15-16). Romance commits the unforgivable sin of
making women appear 'true': genuine, virtuous, virginal, and this,
more than any of the images of falseness and disappointment that
follow, most deeply indicates Romance's perfidy. And yet, true to
Byronic stereotype, the attraction persists. It takes the poet 64
lines to succeed in bidding 'adieu ... a long adieu' to the 'fond
race' (57) of romantic creations, but he is not satisfied with merely
leaving Romance; interestingly, where Southey detected violence
in Romance, Byron uses violence against Romance. Unable to walk
away, he instead metaphorically destroys genre:

135

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136 The Romantic Paradox

The hour of fate is hov'ring nigh,

Even now the gulph appears in view,
Where unlamented you [nymphs of Romance] must lie;
Oblivion's blackening lake is seen,
Convuls'd by gales you cannot weather,

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Where you, and eke your gentle queen [Romance],
Alas! must perish altogether. 2
(58-64)

Here, it is the poet's creative embrace that is fatal; Romance, reputa-

tion ruined, does not survive the poem she at first appeared to
dominate. Byron thus dramatises the strength of Romance's attrac-
tions, his desire to escape them, the need for violent destruction, and,
importantly, his association of Romance and female treachery. The
suitability of violence to facilitate poetic wish-fulfilment is unques-
tioned, and functions as the expression of his ambivalence towards
genre and its contents. 3
Similarly, Letitia Landon's 'Six Songs of Love, Constancy, Romance,
Inconstancy, Truth, and Marriage' (1821) offers a trenchant critique of
the emotion she was criticised by Elizabeth Barrett Browning among
others for concentrating on too exclusively: 'love and love'. 4
Embedded in these songs is Landon's version of To Romance', plotted
as the inevitable link between Constancy and Inconstancy. The voice
proclaiming Constancy resembles Byron's Romance-struck youngster,
impressionable and trusting: 'Oh! Say not love was never made/ For
heart so light as mine;/ / Oh! Say not, that for me more meet/ The
revelry of youth;/ / Tho' mirth may many changes ring,/ Tis love
that gilds the mirthful hour,/ That lights the smile for me,/ Those
smiles would instant lose their power/ Did they not glance on Thee!' 5
Indeed, Landon insists on exactly the female 'truth' Byron's speaker
rejects as romantic, that is, unreal; for her, joy is an outward expres-
sion of the deep river of love and the romance of constancy, and leads
directly to the Eve of St Agnes-like ritual depicted in 'Romance': 'Oh!
Come to my slumber/ Sweet dreams of my love,/ I have hung the
charmed wreath / My soft pillow above' (1-4). 'Romance', associated
with superstition, dreams, and desire for what is absent (alternate
versions of the unreal), is also infused with sadness, as the speaker
attempts to make her night-time vision of love recompense her for
daily neglect: 'Let sleep bring the image/ Of him far away;/ Tis worth
all the tears/ I shed for him by day' (21-4). Romance functions as a
more pleasant substitute for Reality - it is Byron's world of 'golden

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 137

dreams', but where Byron can only escape by consigning Romance to

its own destruction, Landon is both more direct and more subtle. The
'sweet dreams of my love!' (28) are shattered by the opening lines of
'Inconstancy': 'How vain to cast my love away/ On bosom false as
thine' (1-2). The fantasy of love, the assertion of (female) constancy,

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lead inevitably in Landon's 'Songs' to (male) inconstancy; no more
sanguine than Byron that Romance makes for happy endings, Landon
reverses the players: man seduces and abandons, leaving woman with
a cold heart, a new-found distrust of the romantic ideology, and an
abiding interest in self-advancement. Truth' follows 'Inconstancy'
and concludes a romance-laden panegyric on the attractions of the
'hidden Eden of the heart' with this realisation: T thought thus of the
flowers, the moon,/ This fairy isle for you and me;/ And then I
thought how very soon/ How very tired we should be' (17-20).
Landon ends her 'Songs' with a 'matrimonial creed' that sees the final
overthrow of romance - the speaker declares 'He must be rich whom I
could love' (1), and old, and generous to a young wife. Without the
melodramatic conjuring of a 'gulph' in which to dispatch Romance,
Landon as effectively as Byron kills it off.
In these short poems, both poets more forthrightly reveal the
mistrust, unease and dislike with which they view the romance, atti-
tudes that belie the frequency with which both returned to the genre.
To Romance' and 'Six Songs' consolidate, moreover, the themes
which both poets continually treat in their romances: the perfidy or
general trouble embodied by the opposite sex, a cynical depreciation
of the worth and value of romantic - that is, heterosexual - love, the
impossibility of happiness or stability. As with the romances discussed
in the last chapter, Landon's and Byron's rely heavily on the death of
key players, although here it is the more familiar female corpse who
provides the impetus for action or emotion. 6 However, Landon and
Byron do not merely write and rewrite violent romances; instead, they
infuse their poems with change and transformation, both in charac-
terisation and in form. As Jacqueline Rose notes, 'the affinity between
representation and sexuality is not confined to the visual image'; 7
these poems offer representations of sexuality dependent on an eccent-
ric realignment of the classic love triangle. Both poets tilt the
romance; they swing their sympathies away from male-female
pairing, and they push the boundaries of the romance itself until it
assumes a new shape - that of the melodrama. Peter Brooks recognises
that melodrama 'generally operates in the mode of romance, though
with its own specific structures and characters'; 8 as this chapter will

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138 The Romantic Paradox

argue, under Byron and Landon the romance completes its transfor-
mation into melodrama, and in so doing allows for, even depends on,
murder, sexual realignment, and the erection of impassable barriers:
the separate spheres of gender.
Although the melodrama is usually defined as a dramatic form, dating

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in Britain to Thomas Holcroft's 1802 A Tale of Mystery, its components
are not confined to the stage. Judith Pascoe characterises the 1790s
treason trials as melodramatic, for instance, asserting that 'the key
features of melodrama - ... heightened emotiveness in acting style and
female victimization as subject-matter - predate [Holcroft's] crystallizing
work' (57). Despite Pascoe's emphasis on 'acting style', one can see, even
in her parenthesis, how aspects of melodrama permeate Byron's and
Landon's work. The Giaour's many lines of confession or self-justifica-
tion, for instance, are certainly 'heightened', while all of Byron's Eastern
Tales depend on female victimisation. Similarly, Landon's The Venetian
Bracelet' finds its energy in the character of Amenaide who combines in
herself heightened emotion and female victimisation (not to mention
pure villainy). Because 'the melodrama' is so closely identified as a
dramatic subgenre, however, it is necessary to describe how its charac-
teristics apply to the poetry of Byron and Landon. They are not simply
melodramatic - that is, silly and extravagant - in their romances; they
also employ melodrama as a guiding trope, utilising its theatrical flair if
not its purely dramatic credentials. The common understanding of
melodrama - that it 'deal[s] in vulgar extravagance, implausible motiva-
tion, meretricious sensation and spurious pathos' 9 - provides a useful
starting-point. Value judgements aside, extravagance, implausibility,
sensation and pathos are by now familiar catchwords. Throughout this
study, we have seen human relations constructed around these notions;
indeed, it is one of the defining aspects of the romance that it is
somehow different from 'real life', whether through setting, event or
characterisation. What we expect from the melodrama is that it
somehow romanticises romance itself, heightens the already high,
injects drama into what is already theatrical. Brooks summarises prevail-
ing wisdom when he states the 'melodrama at heart represents the
theatrical impulse itself: the impulse toward dramatization, heighten-
ing, expression, acting out' (xi). In this way it escapes its stage-bound
existence, becomes a way of being, a trait, communicated through the
theatricality of the dialogic exchanges in Byron's Tales or of the feeling,
participative narrator in Landon's poems. The melodramatic mode,
then, allows poetry, and poetic speakers, to act out their own distress,
fears, and tendencies towards violence.10

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 139

William Morse sees melodrama as an 'essentialist discourse' of

which 'romantic subjectivity might be considered the ultimate refine-
ment'; it 'suggests the reality of a world beyond representation'. 11 This
indicates that melodrama allows for the voicing of the normally
unspeakable, the enacting of subterranean desires, the poetic staging

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of inadmissible scenes.12 Melodrama encourages the simultaneous
expression and suppression of the unlawful, and it raises expectations
of order within, despite, or dependent on disorder. Its characters are
motivated by single impulses, undiluted by the uncertainty or hesita-
tion that characterises tragedy (Smith 7-17 passim). More forcefully
than the romance, it is 'ideologically counterproductive' (Morse 28) in
that it plays on the desires and conventions of ideology and apes its
mannerisms and disguises, but it also mocks its customs; the very
regularity with which good wins out over evil, the hero successfully
woos the heroine, and 'dream justice' (Smith 34) prevails serves to
emphasise the lack of such order in the 'real world'. When Byron or
Landon portray stock melodramatic scenarios, they simultaneously
play along (order is re-established, usually through death), and play
with, the lines of melodrama: the order they allow at poem's end is
superficially ideologically defensible but also melodramatically
complex. It is both of, and beyond, the world of melodrama.
Therefore, even as melodrama invites definition, it eludes its own
confines. Brooks's expansive description of melodrama indicates its
flexibility: melodrama sees 'the indulgence of strong emotionalism;
moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situa-
tions, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good, and final reward
of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dark plottings,
suspense, breathtaking peripety' (11-12). The poetry of Byron and
Landon makes use of all these elements except the happy ending, in
common with their fellow romancers discussed in previous chapters,
and they energise the devilry of melodrama through a consistent, and
persistent, reliance on full frontal violence: that is, for both Byron and
Landon violence is not only a narrative option but a romantic require-
ment, and it undermines the formation of subjectivity encouraged, in
Morse's view, by melodrama.
As I have indicated, however, Byron and Landon do not simply
rewrite romance as melodrama. Instead, they take advantage of the
melodrama's 'extreme conflicts' and 'extreme conclusions' (Smith 8)
to ask questions about the nature - the naturalness - of romantic rela-
tions. In this they demonstrate melodrama's 'structural malleability',
its willingness 'to incorporate the discourse of ... gender conflict'; it

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140 The Romantic Paradox

is, as Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou argue, a 'process-like

genre, that is, a genre that does not come to rest in fulfillment but,
rather, presents a continually renewed realization'. 13 Under their
poetic management, melodrama not only takes over for romance but
it also recalibrates the parameters of gendered interaction. Romance,

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as previous chapters have argued, is built around uncontested sites of
gendered behaviour translated into generic roles: hero, heroine,
villain, and it is one of the markers of Romantic iconoclasm that so
many writers of the period manipulate these certainties, even as they
exploit their familiar appeal. The Delia Cruscans, with their literary
harem; Coleridge and Keats, each pursuing the romantic quest,
neither satisfied with generic conformity; Robinson and Hemans,
unable to support, or even to compose, a romance that allows the hero
to survive: all defamiliarise the romance but none open up or question
the romance of heterosexuality to the extent that Landon and Byron
do. For, bolstering their tales, one finds melodramas not merely of
failed relationships, but of the impossibility of heterosexuality.
Expressed through the heightened sensationalism of murder, betrayal
and suicide, Byron's and Landon's poetry renders opposite-sex attrac-
tion violently destructive.
They present this differently, however; Byron teases his readers with
repeated examples of fatal devotion, superficially romantic but in each
case triggered by or leading to a necessary homosocial conjoining,
while Landon conveys a despair with the irresistibility of heterosexual
love and its attendant loss of life. In Romanticism and Gender, Anne
Mellor remarks on the prevalence of unhappy love stories in Landon's
poetry and concludes that Landon 'insists upon the absolute division
of the male and female spheres. ... Her poetry can construct only the
private realm of female affections' (118). Built into Mellor's assertion
is an assumption of limitation and a reliance on a dichotomy based on
the patterns of gendered behaviour Mellor sees Landon as celebrating.
However, this chapter questions the construction of Landon as
confined by her exploration of love and romantic relations; instead,
even as Landon reiterates her stories of doomed lovers and thwarted
love, she draws on a very unBurkean notion of feminine beauty as
informed and supported by violence. Landon conflates the 'good girl'
and the femme fatale, creating heroines who as often turn their
despair outward as inward, as soon murder as die. Landon's poetry
depends on love, but it also explodes romance, substituting a world of
betrayal and loss. In this way she suggests a femininity that thrives on
loss and goes down fighting. Landon reinvents romance as melo-

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 141

drama, and disrupts what will, in later decades, become stock charac-
ters and situations by her inclusion of a knowing, participatory
narrative voice, empowered through the paradox of disastrous love.
Where Landon's melodrama depends on the strength of feminine
weakness, Byron's emerges from the overwrought and sensational

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worlds dominated by the Giaour and others. Byron's conflicted and
despairing men, like Landon's equally despairing women, require
death: in this case, the death not of love or of one's rival in love, but
of the love-object. This allows an identification of masculinity with
excessive and ceaseless suffering over love, but without the inconve-
nience of a lover. Moreover, that neither Landon nor Byron shy away
from the explicit and drawn-out depiction of violence allows for an
intriguing and suggestive scenario: the drama of the romance and
violence plays itself out amid the ruins of chivalry, romanticised
gender roles, and literary cohesion.
Byron, writing in the 1810s, constructs his melodramas around the
absent bodies of dead women: Leila, Zuleika, Medora and Parisina are
the putative love-objects for his strong, alienated, compromised
'heroes'. In each poem, murder figures, but it is in his engagement
with violence that Byron institutes change, for the battles and feuds
his male characters indulge in mask a deeper connection than ever the
hero has established with his female lover. The very marginality of the
women's deaths serves as a comment on their importance to plot: for
Byron, the love triangle is only resolved through the woman's death
followed or accompanied by violent clashes between the men. Hero
and villain are blurred categories, and chivalry a mechanical response,
only enlivened when called up in its martial guise. The focus, then, is
not on the heterosexual love relationship, but the hostile homo-
sociality found between men. Melodrama serves to emphasise the
heightened emotions and extreme situations that accomplish the
displacements of 'love' and 'hate'. Landon, writing a decade later, is
no less shy than Byron when it comes to violent situations, and she
too focuses on the disastrous consequences of heterosexual triangles.
Her innovation is to recast the role of rival; where Byron's men fight
each other, Landon's women, with the possible exception of
Amenaide, 14 fight masculinity itself - they find themselves in compe-
tition with the very public sphere held so enticingly open to the men.
Like Byron, however, she (melo)dramatises the incompatibility of the
feminine and masculine worlds and insists on the destructiveness of
love and heterosexual interaction. In 1814, the New British Theatre
proposed that 'in the melo-drama the catastrophe is the physical

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142 The Romantic Paradox

result of mechanical stratagem' (in Cox 27). In the poems discussed in

this chapter, catastrophe is the direct result of the characters' adher-
ence to the strictures of gender and the mechanics of genre, but both
Byron and Landon suggest an alternative world to that of star-crossed
lovers. In Byron, this otherworld is only discernible through the

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violent dispatching of the principle players, an ironic foretaste of the
paradox of unscripted homosocial desire; in Landon, the otherworld
is one always already denied by the endemic, destructive presence of
love itself, which, siren-like, beckons its victims to their deaths.

T h e confusion and subversion of the natural order of

things': 1 5 Byron

For Coleridge, the melodrama represented the topsy-turvy world of

un-nature, especially in its privileging of the ordinary man and
woman over established higher classes; he saw that the melodrama
only superficially ratified real-world values and that, at heart, it valued
the confusing and mixing of roles and classes. Coleridge's fears may
have been based in a desire to preserve a class-bound status quo, but
his perception is valid nonetheless, especially when applied to Byron's
romantic melodramas; 16 in these Tales Byron explores an other-
worldly, subversive landscape that allows, even encourages, the
substitution of homosocial bonding for heterosexual love. Byron's
Tales are, famously, about thwarted love, and the torment experi-
enced by the hero over what is most often a hidden, unspoken grief.
The 'Byronic' hero codified by Peter Thorslev and described in
Chapter 3 is as much a product of the immensely successful romantic
melodramas of 1813-16 as he is derived from the despondent, melan-
cholic Childe Harold. In his Eastern Tales, Byron presents the verities
of romance, violently disrupted to produce what James Smith calls the
melodrama of defeat, where the requisite happy ending is exchanged
for catastrophe; in this version, the good are inevitably hurt by the
bad, and events conspire to thwart resolution (Smith 56 passim). From
The Bride of Abydos' (1813) to 'Parisina' (1816), the weight of events
and predetermined hatreds and prejudices effectively sabotage any
hope of a happy ending; characters wilfully pursue paths littered with
risk and failure, guided by the deus ex machina of the poet himself.
When read as a cluster, these poems reiterate the single point of
doomed subjectivity: in each, the seriously flawed hero and the semi-
justified villain move inexorably towards a moment of violent
confrontation, while the heroine occupies a deeply compromised,

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 143

literally marginalised space. Indeed, Byron's technique exemplifies

Brooks's notion of 'occult meanings', the 'transfer [of] significance
into another context' (9), where metaphor inhabits image to the
extent that things are always both what they seem and beyond
appearances altogether. For Byron, the occult meanings of his Eastern

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Tales gesture towards a world outside expression, though not outside
representation; shadowing, then, the certainties of romance is an
order of things that depends on a melodramatic reappropriation of the
categories of love and desire.
It is a truism of canonical Romanticism that 'the Romantic hero in
effect creates his loved one as an author would a character; she has no
existence apart from his narcissistic perception of her as an extension
of himself'.17 But as Atara Stein goes on to note, it is because she func-
tions as little more than an emanation 18 that the beloved's 'sexuality
is so threatening; the Romantic hero ... wishes to deny his own phys-
icality, to achieve the ideal. Thus, he is repulsed by female sexuality,
and he must avoid contact with it at all costs in order to maintain his
transcendent, superhuman condition' (190). Stein makes a useful
point: the discomfort and ambivalence that accompanies expressions
of strong desire in Byron's Tales suggest that it is not the female
version-of-Self who energises the hero, but rather the antagonist; the
true Other is he who provokes conflict. Despite the easy blame so
often assigned to, say, Leila for the disasters that permeate the Tales,
strife arises between men: woman is tangential, a superfluity.
Jacqueline Rose offers this formulation: 'it is in the normal image of
the man that our certainties are invested and, by implication, in that
of the woman that they constantly threaten collapse' (232).
'Meaning', stability, the Known is self-evident, defined by the male
body, so that by pushing the female body to the margins, by ejecting
heterosexual romance (a dangerous mix of meaning and disintegra-
tion) and focusing on the melodrama of homosocial attraction, Byron
actually creates the melodramatic romance of Self and Other(Self), in
a subversive rewriting of society's rules of attraction. In the Eastern
Tales, then, the heterosexual economy of the romance suffers repeated
assaults, signified by the battered female body, and transmutes into a
homosocial exchange, cemented by male-on-male violence. 19 Even
here, the theatricality of melodrama obtains; as Victor J. Seidler has
argued, masculinity, proved and ratified through sex, is a public
performance, carried on in the public arena and subject to external
checks, yet 'split' and 'fragmented'. 20 Byron's Tales, in the melodrama
of male/male attraction, seek to repair these splits, and yet, as the frag-

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144 The Romantic Paradox

mentary nature of The Giaour' shows, for instance, such efforts are
not fully successful.21
Melodrama, therefore, enacts what Brooks calls 'the saying of self
(38); through melodrama emerges self-expression, cloaked in extrem-
ity. Byron allows for a 'saying of self that the romance cannot

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countenance: a realignment of the romantic relationship and an
enlivening of relations between men, paradoxically founded in
murder. Paraphrasing Luce Irigaray, Trevor Hope describes the 'appar-
ent heterosexual economy of desire imperative within the laws of
kinship and language [that] in fact reproduces itself though a
profound sexual indifference'.22 In other words, heterosexuality
historically is a device by which men disguise their abiding interest in
men - as Irigaray herself calls it, an 'alibi'. 23 In The Giaour', The
Corsair', 'Lara', The Bride of Abydos', and 'Parisina', action hinges on
male/male contact: plot is activated by encounters between men,
while heterosexual love resides in the descriptive realm, a passive
bystander in the clashes precipitated by men's violent emotion. This
is not to say that Byron's female characters do not suffer violence -
indeed, their role is to suffer and, in most cases, be still, immobilised
by the emotion of their men. The poems persist in picturing not their
presence, but their absence, on a variety of literal and metaphorical
levels: they die, are murdered, are mute, or erased, or even regendered.
While Caroline Franklin is right to say that Byron 'recast [s] ... courtly
love as violent forbidden passion' (33), she misidentifies the players in
this passion: the violence is present between men, not between man
and woman. The heroines may desire to be the focus of the men's
attentions, 24 but in each case they are tangential to the poems'
primary concern: the confrontation of 'hero' and 'villain'.
In The Bride of Abydos' and The Giaour', both from 1813, Byron
offers an interesting contrast in method, based around fragmentation,
revision, and the unspoken/unspeakable. 'Bride' reads like a dry run -
a dress rehearsal - for the more intense melodrama of 'Giaour'; its cast
goes through the motions of transferral, exposure and violence carried
off more subtly in 'Giaour'. By dividing 'Bride' into two cantos, Byron
forces revelation: like the turn in a sonnet, the space between Cantos
1 and 2 carries the burden of information half-revealed, of secrets half-
guessed: Tonight, Zuleika, thou shalt hear/ My tale, my purpose, and
my fear - / 1 am not, love! What I appear!' 25 Selim's provocative decla-
ration creates mystery but refuses explanation, putting it off until
'tonight'; it is a familiar melodramatic technique to create suspense
through a partial confession, and Byron emphasises the theatrical

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 145

nature of Selim's 'tale' with the long stretches of dialogue: Selim both
is, and represents, the mysterious stranger whose vital information
proves the key upon which action hinges. To Zuleika, Selim has
become at once known and not-known; he has deconstructed his
identity as 'brother' but has not erected a new persona in its place.

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Again, the space between cantos serves as a borderland - in dramatic
terms, it allows the poet to change the set, to shift alliances, to lower
a new backdrop. The device of cantos assumes an order the poem's
content does not necessarily support, lending a veneer of structure
very different from that found in 'Giaour' with its multiple speakers
and confusing shifts of scene. Indeed, in 'Bride' the poet takes pains
to make sense, opening the poem with a kind of fairy-tale invocation
of a land far away and strange:

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle

Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime,
Where the rage of the vulture - the love of the turtle -
Now melt into sorrow - now madden to crime? -

Tis the clime of the East - 'tis the land of the Sun -
Can he smile on such deeds as his children have done?
Oh! wild as the accents of lovers' farewell
Are the hearts which they bear, and the tales which they tell.
(1:1-4,16-19)

The lilting, singsong meter reflects the languid description, and

hurries the reader past the small signs - 'crime' (4), or 'revenge', for
instance, relegated to a footnote - that this descriptive paradise of
scent and colour might be troubled. The narrator is in character as
bard, the teller of a tale already composed: the romance, always
already in existence, shadows the tale and provides generic structure,
while the faint hint of menace shows the presence, from the first, of a
kind of whispered, gestured-towards, constitutional violence.
The story in 'Bride' follows the familiar melodramatic lines of
mistaken identity, jealousy, love and revenge. It explores passion and
its aggregates: violence and aggression. If, as Jenni Calder argues, for
Byron poetry 'was a way of making passion acceptable', or at least
voiceable, we might read Selim's partial revelation at the end of Canto
I as his attempt to move his passion, with its putative object, Zuleika,
into the realm of possibility.26 Calder goes on to say, however, that

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146 The Romantic Paradox

'passion described, even implied, is passion tamed. Language, particu-

larly written language, has a defusing effect at the same time that it
has an inflating, self-enhancing tendency' (113). 'Bride', in its dual
position as written (poem) and oral (tale with internal dialogue)
attempts the juggling act of representing inflamed passions while

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simultaneously interpreting them: Byron's juxtaposition of the inno-
cent, almost simple Zuleika, ignorant of passions and unable to
withstand their first onslaughts; and the conflicted, vengeful Selim,
the embodied secret, the living evidence of Giaffir's treachery,
bespeaks a poetry dependent on paradox and deception. The order
promised structurally competes with the disorder brought on by plot,
even as Selim's passion, once spoken, becomes wild rather than
tamed, releasing the underwritten aggression between Selim and
Giaffir. True to Calder's premise, the omnipresent narrator ensures the
equal but opposite reaction of Giaffir's fear and jealousy, the only
possible answer to Selim's desire (Zuleika remains silent). The roman-
tic love story figured by Selim and Zuleika is always countered by the
melodrama that simmers between Selim and Giaffir. Indeed, the poem
opens with declarations, not of love, but of hatred and contempt, as
Giaffir taunts Selim to 'assume the distaff with his 'less than woman's
hand', and Selim shoots 'glances even of more than ire' at his father,
as we readers are encouraged to call Giaffir (1:100, 99, 113). Byron sets
up, but seems immediately to disallow, the male-male-female love
triangle; by maintaining the illusion that Giaffir, Selim and Zuleika
form a family, he undermines the power of sexual and romantic love.
That Zuleika is never able successfully to comprehend Selim's trans-
formation from sibling to lover underscores her marginality in the
poem: Selim professes concern and love for her, but fixes his attention
on Giaffir; he deliberately misapplies Zuleika's promise never to leave
him despite her complete incomprehension at his change. Zuleika
bases her promise on the fear that the Sultan to whom Giaffir plans to
marry her is 'some foe' of Selim's; her 'if so' shows that her vow not
to marry 'without [Selim's] free consent' comes not from desire for
Selim, but desire for his approval (1:311, 312, 315). Self-effacingly, she
only wants to please her 'friend' and 'guide' (1:320), but Selim, follow-
ing his own internalised plot of desire and revenge, translates sisterly
affection into romantic love, and the desire to please into a plight of
troth. Were 'Bride' a straightforward romance, Zuleika should find
that Selim's protestations awaken in her wifely desires; instead, she
feels only confusion, her inability to understand Selim's oblique
speech proof of her lack of romantic desire:

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 147

Think not thou art what thou appearest!

My Selim, thou art sadly changed;
This morn I saw thee gentlest, dearest,
But now thou'rt from thyself estranged.
My love thou surely knew'st before,

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It ne'er was less, nor can be more.

Thy cheek, thine eyes, thy lips to kiss,

Like this - and this - no more than this,
For, Alia! Sure thy lips are flame,
What fever in thy veins is flushing?
My own have nearly caught the same,
At least I feel my cheek too blushing.

I meant that Giaffir should have heard

The very vow I plighted thee;

Can this fond wish seem strange in me,

To be what I have ever been?

What other can [I] seek to see

Than thee, companion of [my] bower,
The partner of [my] infancy?
(1:383-8, 394-9, 418-19, 422-4, emphasis added)

Zuleika's words illustrate her abiding desire for things to remain as

they are, for love to remain chaste and familial, and her repeated ques-
tioning - 'Say, why must I no more avow?' (1:426) - indicate her
rejection of the mystery Selim has invoked. That he chooses, not to
answer, but to send her back to her 'tower's retreat' (1:453), the same
domestic space to which Giaffir consigned her, demonstrates his simi-
larity, rather than contrast, to his 'father'. Readers have now arrived at
the gap between cantos, seething with the unexplained, the very
muteness of its text speaking volumes.
Byron uses Canto I to set up the antagonism between Selim and
Giaffir and to sketch in the 'romance' between Selim and Zuleika; in
its reliance on mysterious vows, misunderstandings, and secrecy,

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148 The Romantic Paradox

however, the romance is already flimsier than the as-yet-unrevealed

cause of the Selim/Giaffir rivalry. Giaffir's fragmented T would not
trust that look or tone - / No - nor the blood so near my own - / That
blood - he hath not heard - no more - / I'll watch him closer than
before -' (1:140-3) resonates with Selim's declaration T am not, love!

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What I appear' and implies what Canto II will make clear: the mean-
ingful emotional bond is that between Selim and Giaffir. Zuleika
functions as a symbol of their hatred; her position on the triangle is
that described by Eve Sedgwick: she exists to embody desire between
men, but where Sedgwick concentrates on love, the Byronic triangle
focuses on hate. 27 As Selim reveals, Giaffir is not his father, but his
father's brother, enemy and murderer; Selim himself signifies the
violence of that past family disruption and symbolises its longevity.
The verbose explanation he offers Zuleika returns repeatedly to this
violence rather than his romance, now legitimate, with Zuleika;
indeed, she too can see only its violent implications for herself, voiced
in terms of loss and fear:

'Oh! Not my brother! - yet unsay -

God! Am I left alone on earth?
To mourn - I dare not curse - the day
That saw my solitary birth!
Oh! thou wilt love me now no more!
My sinking heart forboded ill;
But know me all I was before,
Thy sister - friend - Zuleika still.
Thou led'st me here perchance to kill;
If thou hast cause for vengeance - See!
My breast is offer'd - take thy fill!28
Far better with the dead to be
Than live thus nothing now to thee -
Perhaps far worse - for now I know
Why Giaffir always seem'd thy foe;
And I, alas! am Giaffir's child,
For whom thou wert contemn'd - reviled -
If not thy sister - wouldst thou save
My life - oh! bid me be thy slave!'
(11:165-83)

I have quoted this at length to demonstrate that Zuleika's concerns

rest in family connections, asexual and unromantic; to her lament

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 149

Selim makes only the cursory response 'My slave, Zuleika! - nay, I'm
thine:/ But, gentle love, this transport calm', and within eleven lines
has reaffirmed 'thy Sire's my deadliest foe' (11:184-5, 196). This preoc-
cupies Selim, and fills up nine stanzas, during which Zuleika, 'mute
and motionless,/ Stood like that statue of distress - / When, her last

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hope for ever gone,/ The mother hardened into stone' (11:491-4).
Despite Selim's vows of romantic love, Zuleika consistently thinks,
and is presented, in terms of family love, and this, much more than
inscription alone, defuses the passion of love in their 'romance'; in
this poem, the romance of family transmutes into melodrama of
rivalry, the body - the fact - of Zuleika furnishing both cause and
effect. When Giaffir finally appears and battle begins, Zuleika remains
in the grotto in which she had met Selim and heard his tale of family
destruction. Selim, meanwhile, goes to fight and join his comrades,
only to be killed by Giaffir in another meaningful pause: 'Ah! where-
fore did he turn to look/ For her his eye but sought in vain?/ That
pause - that fatal gaze he took - / Hath doomed his death - or fixed
his chain' (11:563-6). The poem climaxes in death, Selim's and
Zuleika's, whose heart 'burst[s]' and eye 'close[s] before his own';
unable to bear the revelations, she simply expires (11:619, 620). And
yet her death is marginal, literally and figuratively: the action and the
focus is on the death of Selim at Giaffir's hands, while Zuleika is
reduced to parts, 'the only heart - the only eye -' (11:615) - unnamed,
barely remarked. Even, then, as the poet allows us a glance at Zuleika,
he drains her of significance in the text; the 'marble stone' laid to
commemorate her death transports itself overnight to 'where Selim
fell', so that Zuleika's final memorial recognises only Selim (11:717,
722). There meaning resides, melodramatic talisman marking not
love, but death; not forgiveness, but rancour. The poem revolves
around the struggle between Giaffir and Selim, fought around but ulti-
mately unconcerned with Zuleika: she is incidental, a romantic
footnote to the body of the text. 29
'Bride' gestures towards the creation of full-blown melodramatic
conflict, but has not yet relinquished the romance, hence Zuleika's odd
status; she is there and not there, a catalyst yet inessential to the melo-
romantic plot. In The Giaour' Byron presents a more coherent
melodrama of violence, paradoxically accomplished through the
rhetoric of fragments. Jerome McGann has called 'Giaour' an 'evident
masquerade': 'masquerade is interpersonal and social',30 taking place
publicly, a means of facilitating social contact while maintaining the
privacy of personal passions. The poem, with its changing speakers and

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150 The Romantic Paradox

points of view, allows for the constant intermingling of voices, playing

parts and conforming to types, encouraged by the masquerade; it is a
kind of costumed melodrama, a performance based on audience parti-
cipation and on their willingness to gloss over the dramatically
unromantic nature of the Giaour/Hassan/Leila love triangle. As with

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'Bride', this relationship pivots on the woman, but unlike 'Bride', she
is absent before the poem even begins. The well-known panegyric to
Greece that opens the poem allows the poet to establish the ground
rules of gender, filtered through politics: Greece is persistently femin-
ised, a 'fair clime' that Tend[s] to loneliness delight' (7,11), comparable
in sensations evoked to the romance of 'the attachment of the nightin-
gale to the rose' (Byron's footnote). Overrun by the tyrants of Lust and
Rapine, 'hers is the loveliness in death' (1. 94); Greece is now the equiv-
alent of a fallen woman with an illustrious past betrayed by the sordid
present. Considering the status of 'Giaour' as a romance, the speaker's
avowal - 'no more her sorrows I bewail,/ Yet this will be a mournful
tale' (164-5) - suggests that the 'her' that is Greece foreshadows the
human female whose entrance in the poem coincides with her exit: fair
Leila, the unnamed 'it' whose dispatching is accomplished in a single
line. Greece, in part responsible for her own downfall, prefigures Leila,
and the speaker's lengthy turn serves to introduce both the notion of
female culpability, and the necessity to turn from it to another tale.
'Women', to quote Calder, 'enhance the hero, but are expendable'
(120): hence Leila's equivocal position; she serves to bring together
Hassan and the Giaour, but is never actually there herself - that is, she
is only ever spoken of, always already absent.
Leila, then, not even named until line 444 (70 lines after her death),
is the cipher by which Hassan and the Giaour encode their mutual
attraction - although perhaps repulsion is the more suitable word. Her
colour is white, 31 itself invisible and empty, whether she is the 'speck
of white' sinking like a 'lessening pebble', or the post-humous
memory with 'fair cheek', white feet, and 'whiter neck' (382, 381, 493,
501, 511). Leila lacks blood: she is all white flesh, insubstantial, a
ghost even before her death, a 'bundle' after. The speaker links the
recital of Leila's sinking with a warning to Beauty:

So Beauty lures the full-grown child

If won, to equal ills betrayed,

Woe waits the insect and the maid,
A life of pain, the loss of peace,

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 151

From infant's play, or man's caprice:

The lovely toy so fiercely sought
Has lost its charm by being caught,
For every touch that wooed its stay
Hath brush'd its brightest hues away

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Till charm, and hue, and beauty gone,
Tis left to fly or fall alone.
(396, 400-9)

Here, again, the speaker gestures towards Leila's insubstantiality in the

plot; if we are to make any sense of this aside, we can only see it as a
veiled indication of Leila's alternative storyline: to be discarded by the
Giaour. She is instead killed by Hassan for her 'faithlessness',32 at
which point the romance necessarily concludes, at least that
conducted by the heterosexual couple. It is Leila's death that fires the
passionate hatred of the Giaour for Hassan, and Leila's life that
focused Hassan's attention on the Gaiour: 'Her mate - stern Hassan,
who was he?/ Alas! that name was not for thee!' (517-18). Although
Marlon Ross asserts that the Byronic hero requires 'the presence of the
feminine', 33 it is plain that only Leila's absence will do, and that the
Giaour substitutes vows of love for vows of violence, his attention
settled on stern Hassan; in this way 'Giaour' enacts what Juliet Flower
MacCannell calls 'the regime of the brother', the potent exchange of
patriarchy for fraternity.34 As much as Selim's rage against Giaffir is
that of the dispossessed son against the usurping father, so too the
hatred of the Giaour and Hassan rests on their footing as equals.
Again, Leila is the absent signifier; she exists - or rather, ceases exist-
ing - to facilitate and instigate their contact. Once Hassan has proved
his interest by depriving the Giaour of Leila, the Giaour responds by
depriving Hassan of life. The Giaour and Hassan, seemingly so differ-
ent, follow the same philosophy of violence and revenge, and in this
way they function as brothers-in-arms, 'mutually complicating self
and other in a contingency so radical as to elide claims to an
autonomous subject or object', in Laura Claridge's words. 35 In the
partnership cemented over Leila's missing body, neither Hassan nor
the Giaour emerge vindicated; each fights in her name, 36 but both
fight for themselves, provoked by 'mutual wrong/ And fate and fury'
(634-5, emphasis added). The mutual wrong plays out the mutual
implication described by Claridge.
'Giaour', then, is ruled not by the romance of lost love, or even the
thwarted and disrupted romance described in previous chapters, but

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152 The Romantic Paradox

by a melodramatic privileging of hate, vengeance, and subversive

attraction. The poet performs the substitution of love for hate by
emphasising the attractions of violent emotion:

But Love itself could never pant

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For all that Beauty sighs to grant,
With half the fervour Hate bestows
Upon the last embrace of foes,
When grappling in the fight they fold
Those arms that ne'er shall lose their hold;
Friends meet to part - Love laughs at faith -
True foes, once met, are joined till death!
(647-54)

Byron appropriates the marriage ideal for this meeting of enemies, 37

but he goes further; not only are the Gaiour and Hassan 'joined till
death'; they also share attitudes and beliefs (religion aside). They are
matched in an ideology of homosociality that can see woman only as
an appendage. When the Giaour bends over the dead Hassan 'with
brow/ As dark as his that bled below' (673-4), he mirrors Hassan phys-
ically; when he confesses to the monk, he echoes Hassan's philosophy:

... if it dares enough, 'twere hard

If passion met not some reward -
No matter how - or where - or why,
I did not vainly seek - nor sigh:
Yet sometimes with remorse in vain
I wish she had not lov'd again.
She died - I dare not tell thee how;
But look! - tis written on my brow!

Still, ere thou dost condemn me - pause -

Not mine the act, though I the cause;
Yet did he but what I had done
Had she been false to more than one;
Faithless to him - he gave the blow,
But true to me - I laid him low;
Howe'er deserv'd her doom might be
Her treachery was truth to me.
(1050-7, 1060-7 emphasis added)

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 153

He is most haunted by the battle with Hassan, although he consis-

tently regards it in the light of Leila's death:

'Much in his visions mutter he

Of maiden 'whelmed beneath the sea;

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Of sabres clashing - foemen flying,
Wrongs avenged - and Moslem dying.
On cliff he hath been known to stand
And rave as to some bloody hand
Fresh sever'd from its parent limb,
Invisible to all but him,
Which beckons onward to his grave,
And lures to leap into the wave.'
(822-31)

It is significant that Leila's death merits only one line, while the vision
haunting the Giaour is that of Hassan's severed hand - severed, of
course, by the Giaour. What Butler calls 'the hero's terrible sense of
sexual guilt and loss' (92) rests as much on the loss of Hassan as of
Leila; the Giaour concentrates both fury and desire on his mirror
image, as much villain-hero as he is himself. The wild battle, the
curses, the cries, the tableaux of bloody violence - 'sabre shiver'd to
the hilt,/ Yet dripping with the blood he spilt' (655-6) - the set scenes
of mountain pass and monastery: all invoke the excesses of the melo-
drama, called into use to disguise and yet accentuate the fateful
meeting of the Giaour and Hassan. Brooks says that 'the desire to
express all seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic
mode' (4), and certainly the Giaour's more than 300 lines of confes-
sion attest to his powers of speech. He perhaps reveals more than he
intends, or understands, however, when he casts himself and Hassan
as from the same mould, and when he describes his vain search 'to
find,/ The workings of a wounded mind' (1089-90). Though Hassan
may not agree, the Giaour sees himself and Hassan as linked, and
desires to find in Hassan the same 'wounded mind' he carries. His
'Leila - Each thought was only thine! -' (1181) rings less with convic-
tion than with a certain hollow desire: Leila and Hassan are joined in
the Giaour's imagination, so much so that the sight of her 'form' at
the poem's end provokes the Giaour to assert immediately 'But he is
dead - Within the dell/ I saw him buried where he fell;/ He comes not
- for he cannot break/ From earth - why then are thou awake?'
(1302-5, emphasis added). The reader recognises that for the Giaour,

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154 The Romantic Paradox

the heterosexual romantic bond and the homosocial bond are inti-
mately linked. They draw, and define, each other, and both are
predicated on moments of extreme brutality, the murder of the
desired, and the plunge into sensation, violence and theatrical decla-
rations of hatred and revenge. By blurring roles, by exploring the

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attraction of like to like filtered through the savage, yet silent, elimi-
nation of the female, Byron encourages a reading of The Giaour' as a
romantic melodrama, 'cast[ing] [virtue's] very survival into question
... obscurfing] its identity' (Brooks 29). The poem ends, paradoxically,
by affirming 'He pass'd - nor of his name and race/ Hath left a token
or a trace,/ Save what the father must not say/ Who shrived him on
his dying day;/ This broken tale was all we knew/ Of her he lov'd, or
him he slew' (1329-34). 'What the Father must not say' comprises
exactly that which we have just finished reading: the oral and written
clash again, producing the illogical situation that the poem's story, as
related by the Giaour, is forbidden knowledge (as indeed it must be),
and yet it is also common knowledge. The lines between the unspeak-
able, the unspoken, and the speechless waver, generating the
melodramatic 'text of muteness' described by Brooks.
Attraction and repulsion thus join the congregation of the
compelling taboo in Romantic poetry. In describing the parameters
and uses of incest in Romanticism, for instance, Alan Richardson has
noted that

when the Romantics portray an erotic relationship ... the ideal

they look towards is a total sympathetic fusion. Such sympathy
cannot come about spontaneously, through an intuitive recogni-
tion of spiritual harmony, but must be developed through
experience and shared associations The Romantic poet is drawn
to mingle [erotic and sibling] love by a fascination with the power
of sympathy, but that power is broken by the unconscious horror
of incest, and the fascination turns to guilt or revulsion shortly
before or shortly after the union is consummated. 38

In The Giaour', all that Leila and the Giaour share is religious belief.
They are both Christians, but even here the resemblance is only
passing, as Byron emphasises when he colours Leila white and the
Giaour black. The deepest shared experience - Richardson's 'sympa-
thetic fusion' - is that between Hassan and the Giaour: as men, they
share masculinity itself, and as the Gaiour makes plain, they both
regard Leila as a possession, as a trophy, rather than as a true love;

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 155

both define love for a woman through images of ownership and of

competition between men. 'Yet did he but what I had done/ Had she
been false to more than one' (1062-3): the Giaour faults not Hassan's
logic, but rather Hassan's choice of object for his violent revenge. As
Daniel P. Watkins observes, 'it becomes apparent through the narra-

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tive that [Leila's] value depends exactly on [the Giaour's] ability to
take her from Hassan for himself and to possess her entirely', 39 a
formulation dependent not on Leila's centrality for the Giaour, but on
Hassan's; the point, for the Gaiour, is what Hassan has rather than
who Leila is. Leila stands in as the conveniently feminine, yet equally
conveniently dead, substitute, an embodiment of the Hassan/Giaour
relationship. 40 That relationship provides the raison d'etre of the
romantic melodrama energising the poem. Even as incestuous
consummation - the heterosexual meeting of like with like - turns
love to revulsion, so too homosocial consummation: expressed
through violence and the hypermasculine activity of battle. The
bloody dispatching of Hassan, the repellent picture of his Towering'
'unclos'd eye' (670, 669), and the transformation of body to corpse
figure another version of the 'unconscious horror' described by
Richardson. Thereafter, the Giaour's guilt, loss and melancholy
revolve around Hassan as much as Leila, though articulated negatively
(as they must be), and it is, finally, less surprising than fitting that,
when confronting the vision of Leila at the poem's end, the Giaour
looks around for stern Hassan as well, his partner in hate. To quote
Watkins again, "The Giaour" is excessively melodramatic and overtly
escapist... [and] in its final form it remains disturbingly fragmented'
(874): in its attempt to escape the romance of compulsory heterosex-
uality, it turns instead to the melodrama, but even here the alternative
to the romance remains unspeakable. The best that can be achieved is
a fragmentary romantic melodrama, with no survivors, and with its
secrets haltingly, yet effectively, maintained.
In The Giaour', then, Byron offers his most fully worked through,
yet, with its competing narrators, obliquities of plot and sheer poetic
density, most complexly fragmented alternative to romance; his
subsequent Eastern tales - The Corsair', 'Lara', and 'Parisina', for
example - are both more coherent as poems and less full as narratives
of homosociality. And yet, each reiterates the 'Bride'/'Giaour' ethos
that subordinates heterosexual romance to violent homosocial
contact. The Eastern Tales portray women as little more than pawns,
markers in the battle between men, Mellor's 'series of female
corpses'. 41 It may be true that in The Corsair' (1814) 'love is one of

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156 The Romantic Paradox

the central fields of expression of the hero's personality', but it

proceeds destructively: the semi-adulterous kiss with Gulnare inex-
orably means Medora's death: 'It was enough - she died - what recked
it how?' (3:625).42 Indeed, love and violence are intertwined in this
poem - Gulnare proves hers, for instance, through the 'unsexing' act

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of murder. Again, however, the unremarked central relationship is
that between Conrad and Seyd; Conrad rushes from Medora's arms to
Seyd's more martial embrace and the consummation of their destruc-
tive feelings through battle. In this relationship, Seyd is the enigmatic
odalisque, defined almost solely through his silences once the battle
has begun, and waiting to die, although he does not know this:
'Within the Haram's secret chamber sate/ Stern Seyd, still pondering
o'er his Captive's fate;/ His thoughts on love and hate alternate dwell,/
Now with Gulnare, and now in Conrad's cell' (3:131-4). Stern Seyd,
like stern Hassan, conflates love and hate and, as his threatening
response to Gulnare's pleas on Conrad's behalf show, elides the
boundaries of enemy and friend. But it is Gulnare's murder of Seyd
that focuses the poem's shifting sexual alliances, for this loss, more
than that of liberty or of Medora's life, signals Conrad's transforma-
tion from active to passive: his hand 'had lost its firmness, and his
voice its tone' (3:540). Byron extends his description of Conrad's
turmoil to a distracting degree (it occupies stanzas 13-17), and
certainly Conrad explains his change to himself in terms of Gulnare's
betrayal of her femininity and his part in her crime, but nonetheless,
even as Conrad has lived a life of violence and confrontation, he has
required an object on which to focus, and it is his loss of Seyd, rather
than Medora, that provokes his change. As in 'Lara', the unsexed (or
cross-dressed) woman is tangential to the concentrated hatred
between men, fuelled by melodramatic reliance on images of
unnamed treachery, irrational violence, and 'dramatic confrontation
and peripety' (Brooks 25). In 'Lara' (1814), Kaled's unmasking - itself
a melodramatic development - is shunted to near the poem's end; the
Lara/Otho quarrel dominates Canto Two (Canto One is used to estab-
lish character), from the men's mutual 'bar[ing] of 'willing weapons'
(II:iii:34) to their subsequent focused, mutual hatred and warring. 43 It
is battle between men, not romantic love, that fuels these poems:
repeatedly, men turn to, find their fullest existence in, the public
sphere of violence, where they join like with like and progress to the
expected denouement: violent death, the only permitted expression
(or outcome?) of homosocial attraction.
'Parisina' (1816) completes the cycle, and adds only the twist of

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 157

incest, not of blood but by law. By creating Parisina as Hugo's love

initially before claimed by Azo ('thy bride/... / Thou know'st for me
was destined long. / Thou saw'st, and coveted'st her charms' [253,
255-6], says Hugo), Byron redirects the conflict inward: incest signifies
not irresistible romantic love but unchecked male-male aggression and

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rivalry.44 Like Leila, Parisina exists to focus the hatred between Azo
and Hugo; romance is submerged in the melodrama of revenge,
sought both by Hugo on his mother's account and Azo on his own.
Parisina's marginality is confirmed by her silence in the text: after her
drama-inducing 'mutter' of 'a name she dare not breathe by day' (71,
72), her only other utterances are a Tow hollow groan', 'one long
shriek', and a 'shrill', 'wild' 'woman's shriek' (344, 347, 489, 498).
Significant in their wordlessness, Parisina's sounds highlight the
extended speeches given to Azo, Hugo and the speaker himself; from
the start, Parisina is 'still, and pale, and silenft]', 'all pale and still', and
puts up no resistance to the narrator's judgement that she is 'the
living cause of Hugo's ill' (147, 326, 327). This nod to convention
incompletely masks the true cause of Hugo's troubles - his father's
inadequacies; Parisina's silence and hidden fate (she merely disap-
pears) suggest she is purely functional. Incest, then, represents the
unspeakable closeness of Azo and Hugo, a father-son pair whose most
significant relationship is with each other. Ironically enough,
although 'Parisina' signals the end of Byron's explorations of roman-
tic melodrama, it is the least satisfying, the least coherent in its
construction of the male-male bond. It is as if, by telling the story
again and again, Byron's copies get fainter and fainter: the outline
remains but the details have become blurred, distorted, almost oblit-
erated. What Brooks calls the text of muteness is also invoked by
James Soderholm's concept of 'active forgetfulness', the 'creation of
new values or the transvaluation of old ones'. This allows for the
creation of a 'new language (a new vocabulary) for reweaving one's
web of beliefs and desires'.45 In telling and retelling his Tale, Byron
recasts the heterosexual romance as the melodrama of homosociality,
and yet he relates it increasingly unsuccessfully. The Eastern Tales are
an exercise in repeated forgetting: the same story repeatedly told, with
much the same outcome. As an attempt to change the established
narrative pattern of the romance, the Tales successfully redirect the
attractions of the heterosexual love story, instituting the melodrama
of shared experience, an exploration of homosocial bonding only
voiceable through violence. For Byron, violence is both a useful narra-
tive element and an essential structural device; what Laura Claridge

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158 The Romantic Paradox

calls his 'healthy appetite for his own fictions of total divestiture'
(211) enforces the repeated exploration, and destruction, of sustained
homosocial bonding, of desire between men. Because romance
between men is not speakable, Byron turns to the melodrama and its
potential for signifying silences.

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'Grief, disappointment, the fallen leaf, the faded flower,
the broken heart, the early grave': 4 6 Letitia Landon

Landon, contemporary of Hemans, died in 1838, and in her we find

the ultimate Romantic Victorian, 47 romancer, melodramatist, bio-
grapher of love and violator of its softer comforts; she was 'deeply read
in Byron' whose 'life and writings were the dominant influence on her
own work and career. She inherited the scepticism for which his name
would be the byword', and she directed her sceptical gaze on romance
and its ramifications (McGann and Riess, 17, 18). Ironically enough
for a poet criticised in her own time and now as a disciple of love, 48
Landon embeds in her poetry distrust and disillusion, and provokes
repeated confrontations with the stereotype of Woman Writing
Romance: like Hemans, she invests love with death, although where
Hemans allows only the mother to invade the heterosexual binary,
Landon utilises both same-sex rivals, and culture itself, as the melo-
dramatic twist to her tale. Byron's interest lay in redirecting romantic
energy from heterosexuality to homosociality; he adapted the melo-
drama to transformative ends, using its excesses, twinning them with
violent and bloody deaths, merging attraction and repulsion in a
compulsive meeting of like with like, a compulsive retelling of the tale
of negative desire. Landon, however, uses melodrama not to allow the
unlawful, but to dramatise the dark excesses of love on the female
body, to release the violence of hatred in the otherwise properly femin-
ine, and to encourage the destruction of romance. Heterosexual desire
underpins her romances, but it acts implosively; when Landon
declares that she has 'always sought to paint [love] as self-denying,
devoted, and making an almost religion of its truth' (Venetian Bracelet,
'Preface', vi-vii), one sees the skill with words that has led Harriet
Kramer Linkin to describe her as 'the controlling female poet who
effects an aesthetic liminality that frees her from the limits imposed
on the specularized body her [poetic] character[s] represen[t]'. 49
Landon uses reassuringly conventional diction, but it is the literal
truth that her version of Love denies, even erases, the body (through
death); is 'devoted' in its zealous, fanatical and purposefully destruc-

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 159

tive sense; and comprises a religion in its rituals, rites and supersti-
tions. And yet, as is necessary for a poet who writes for a living and
who must, like Hemans and Robinson before her, please a fickle audi-
ence, Landon veils her violent impulses: hostility is rendered as
tragedy, and premeditation trivialised as hysteria. In so doing, Landon

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establishes the melodrama as the only possible genre for love: tales of
mistaken identity, fatal mistakes and noble orphans abound, all in the
service of the religion of love. Landon uses melodramatic situations
and domesticised violence to ridicule human pretensions to romantic
happiness; in her poems, successful love is as unattainable as mascu-
line contentment is in Byron's.
To activate her tales, Landon draws on cultural stereotypes of
gender; in Mellor's memorable phrase, she 'exhausts the beautiful',
playing on expectations of femininity, female authorship and female
responses to love, characterised (by Byron most famously) as central
to women's existence. 50 Mellor, however, sees in Landon's technique
a complicity with social mores; in her readings, Landon 'work[s] from
within an essentialist construction of the female as beautiful and
loving' (120). While it is undeniable that, as Mellor notes, Landon
'insists upon the absolute division of the male and female spheres'
(118), she does so in a more active way than Mellor allows for: she
works, not 'within', but with essentialist constructions, exploring the
results of acculturation, exposing the risks of wholesale reliance on
love. She portrays the spheres of masculine and feminine lifestyles not
from the blinkered perspective of one trapped within 'the private
realm of female affections' (Mellor 118), but from the omniscient posi-
tion of narrator and poet, one aware enough to recognise the market
value of romance even as she refutes its self-referentiality:

with regard to the frequent application of my works to myself,

considering that I sometimes portrayed love unrequited, then
betrayed, and again destroyed by death - may I hint the conclu-
sions are not quite logically drawn, as assuredly the same mind
cannot have suffered such varied modes of misery. However, if I
must have an unhappy passion, I can only console myself with my
own perfect unconsciousness of so great a misfortune.
(Venetian Bracelet, 'Preface', vii-viii)

In other words, Mellor's entrapped poetess represents simply a

persona employed by Landon to demonstrate her poetic fitness - she
writes what she knows (but don't believe all you read). However,

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160 The Romantic Paradox

accompanying her witty disclaimer to being the unfortunate victim of

her own scenarios of failed love are her poems - tragic, romantic,
melodramatic: accumulations of proof that Love itself 'necessitates'
the separation of spheres, as I discuss below. '[D]arker strains ... [and
the] haunting omnipresence of death' (Curran 189) freely roam her

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poetry, imagery correlated with the mixing of spheres; the violence
that infiltrates all love relationships functions as an indication that
the exaggeration of gender and the perceived need for separate
spheres causes actual bodily harm. Landon's melodramatic romances
culminate in moments of crossing over. Therefore, in her poems, she
dramatises the ramifications of a cultural insistence on separate
spheres by repeatedly showing the danger inherent in their joining.
Melodrama resides in the excesses of emotion and plot contingent on
declarations of love - declarations always doomed from the moment
of utterance, since they signal the momentary meeting of spheres as
well as of bodies. Her experienced and cynical narrator can conceive
of no viable romantic attachments, and so continually constructs
worlds wherein desire irresistibly invites violence, while love reveals
itself as the mask for betrayal and destruction. In this way, violence
replaces love, and by manipulating stereotypes of emotion Landon
frees herself to reveal the inadequacies of gender. Where Byron, then,
creates a melodrama of unspeakable passions, Landon wields the
melodrama of defeat to expose the damage inherent in separating
spheres, and she does so by allowing the violence intrinsic to a divided
society to redound on its willing inhabitants. She poisons the spheres,
renders them fatal to the opposite sex, and thereby hastens the demise
of romance itself.
For Landon, gender is the worst enemy of love. Byron, although
transformative and discontent, still worked within conventions of
gender: he wrote men's men and men's women. Landon, too, popu-
lates her poems with stock characters, easily recognisable to a
twentieth-century audience familiar with theatrical stereotypes, but
she goes further than Byron: for her, gender is necessarily both self-
and other-destructive. For Landon, poetry is the vehicle whereby she
challenges society to justify its morals, and her disillusionment is
evident in her repeated tragic outcomes. Landon's narrator is complicit
with society, rather than the poet, who deploys the narrative voice as
a participant in her romances. As McGann and Riess realise, 'Landon's
greatest subject [was] ^satisfaction with her epoch's satieties and
satisfactions' (Selected Writings 30): far from reiterating 'love, and
love', she exposes it, accuses it of murder, and executes it in the court-

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 161

room drama underpinning her romances, each of which is further

evidence of love's criminality. Backing love is the societal mandate for
division, figured mainly by gender and symbolised by separate
spheres. As Isobel Armstrong says, 'the simpler the surface of the
poem, the more likely it is that a second and more difficult poem will

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exist beneath it'. 51 Landon uses conventional imagery to pillory
convention; she borrows sensation from melodrama to rile her
romances, and to irritate Love into giving up its secret: its destruc-
tiveness for women and men. But because she does not let her narrator
in on this project, the poem seemingly pursues and replicates its plot-
led concerns, a centripetal narrative velocity leading readers ever
further in. Landon reserves her prefatory space for her author's voice;
she narrates the poem in her poetess's voice. The dedicated serial
reader may come to understand that in the repeated scenes of despair,
grief and death Landon builds up her 'more difficult poem'; the melo-
drama may contain meaning, or only house emotions. Landon
challenged her culture to remedy the damage caused by an expedient
acceptance of hierarchy and the false chivalry of separate spheres, and
in this way she performs the most difficult task of romance: the
doomed defence of the weakest. In the deaths suffered by her women
and men, the issue of who loves who is in the end subordinated to a
disquisition on Love itself, and the main witness called against its
cultural monopoly is the melodrama.
In The Venetian Bracelet' (1829), Landon foregrounds her theme of
the destructive nature of heterosexual love by contrasting the internal
ravages of consuming violent emotion with its murderous outward
expression. Devoting herself to love, Amenaide, the young and beau-
tiful heroine, plays out a role predestined to end in tragedy; as with all
her romances, in 'Venetian Bracelet' Landon allows not surprise, but
familiarity, to guide her plot, and in so doing exposes the truth of
love's danger. Within the poem, characters, settings and plot are all
subordinate to the intertextual preoccupation with the irresistibility
of love and its automatic, unavoidable failure; as she says in 'Roland's
Tower' (discussed below), 'they loved; - they were beloved' (93). But
the sensation of being in love is, in Landon, the catalyst for cata-
strophe - something happens when a woman and a man feel and
declare love, a kind of chemical reaction that adduces only, and ever,
violence. In 'Venetian Bracelet', Landon begins her tale by apos-
trophising Italy, much as Byron treats Greece in The Giaour':
'Another tale of thine! Fair Italie - / What makes my lute, my heart,
aye turn to thee?' (1-2). Italy is to Landon as Homer is to Keats: the

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162 The Romantic Paradox

unknown yet vital signifier, mediated through others' representations,

omnipresent as the necessary corollary to a certain kind of poetry, a
certain kind of plot. Not knowing the language or the cities of Italy
does not prevent Landon from writing of them; indeed, the poem's
first stanza contains a credible description of what Landon affirms she

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does not know, yet finds herself returning to. Italy functions as the
unreal - Thou art not stamped with that reality/ Which makes our
being's sadness, and its thrall!' (23-4) - and therefore gives licence to
romance, yet it paradoxically provides the setting for a tale Landon
portrays as all too real, and too frequently betrayed love. Authorising
romance, Landon's fantasy Italy escapes its comforting identity as
unreal and free from life's 'sadness' as soon as the narrator introduces
the idea of sadness, 'for e'en on this bright soil/ Grief has its shadow,
and care has its coil' (57-8). Despite Italy's initial status as the antidote
to grief and care, Landon inexorably reveals its participation in
sadness; if not already 'stamped with reality', Italy receives the impress
by the narrator herself, who seems impelled to invade Eden. And yet,
since Italy always already contained grief, it seems more to the point
to note that Landon does not so much impose, as uncover grief, and
in so doing reiterates the inescapabiity of love gone wrong. Moreover,
she has a project, reminiscent of the value of the vicarious described
by Anna Letitia Barbauld and discussed in Chapter 1: 'we rise up less
selfish, having known/ Part in deep grief, yet that grief not our own'
(73-4). Landon has manoeuvred violence and tragedy from 'real life'
to the unreal, to record an object lesson in emotions untrammelled:
the melodrama shortly to unfold, then, is part fable, part entertain-
ment, part revelation; the Italy of 'Venetian Bracelet' serves as the
backdrop to an exploration of female violence. The 'female Byron'
directs our attention to a tale as dependent on, yet revelatory of,
conventions of gender as any Eastern tale. 52
In 'Venetian Bracelet', Landon offers an initial romantic tableau
complete in all particulars: an attractive young pair, 'she with her eyes
cast down, for tears were there,/ Glittering upon the eyelash, though
unshed;/ He murmuring those sweet words so often said/ By parting
lover' (76-9). Landon relies on readers steeped in romance to supply
the dialogue; here, she is motivated by the visual suitability of the
couple, whose youth, beauty and pathos mark them as the young
lovers soon to be parted by circumstance. They are stock melodra-
matic characters, 53 and as such at this point are rendered completely
visually, especially Amenaide, whose description hints at another
melodramatic convention:

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 163

The girl was beautiful; her forehead high

Was white as are the marbled fanes that lie
On Grecian lands, making a fitting shrine
Where the mind spoke; the arch'd and raven line
Was very proud ...

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She wore the peasant dress, - the snowy lawn
Closer around her whiter throat was drawn,
A crimson bodice, and the skirt of blue
So short, the fairy ankle was in view;
The arm was hidden by the long loose sleeve,
But the small hand was snow; around her hair
A crimson net, such as the peasants weave,
Bound the rich curls, and left the temples bare.
She wore the rustic dress, but there was not
Aught else in her that mark'd the rustic's lot:
Her bearing seem'd too stately, though subdued
By all that makes a woman's gentlest mood -
The parting hour of love.
(81-5, 88-99, emphasis added)

Landon encourages the specularisation of Amenaide; she holds our

attention, is the poem's focus, while Leoni, her lover, is little more
than a prop, the necessary adjunct to Amenaide's deep emotion. Love,
too, is stereotyped, described by the experienced narrator in world-
weary tones that bode ill for happy endings: 'They loved with such
deep happiness and truth, - / . . . . / They parted trustingly; they did
not know/ The vanity of youthful trust and vow' (115, 123-4). Even
as she introduces the lovers, the narrator invites sympathy for their
inevitable lorn state, and shunts the romance to the past. Amenaide
and Leoni have already fallen in love, and that love is already fated to
end, just as Leoni is fated to 'spring upon his snow-white steed' (133)
and go to war, and Amenaide is fated to suffer anxiety, fear, dread, and
woe: 'And these, Amenaide, were all for thee' (154). The speaker uses
the poem's first lines to establish that her story is an old one, and to
squeeze in the expected moments of love, loss, and restored identity,
for no sooner does Leoni leave and Amenaide reflect on her orphaned
rustic status than her nurse thrusts her into a group of strangers who
call her Countess and seemingly remove the only obstacle in her
union with Leoni - her class-position. Landon is in a hurry: she

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164 The Romantic Paradox

compresses parting and revelation into Part I of the poem's 14,54 gath-
ering for her readers the necessary players, sketching the necessary
events, and, importantly, combining Amenaide's necessary depth of
emotion with 'pride'. Glennis Stephenson notes that 'Love is, indeed, at
the very center of Landon's poetic universe', 55 but she does not credit

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Landon with much finesse: while 'Venetian Bracelet' is 'about' love
betrayed and the woman scorned, it is also about the clash between
romance and reality, as suggested by the opening appeal to Italy. What
we have read so far is romance, which Landon proceeds to complicate.
Part II opens with another portrait of Amenaide, changed in rank but
not in attractions. We learn that Leoni 'was return'd, with all war could
confer/ Of honourable name, to home and her' - and yet not quite to
her, as instead of rushing lover-like to her arms, 'Leoni would tonight
be in the hall/ Where Count Arezzi held his festival' (223-4, 225-6).
Amenaide salves her 'moment's grief that they should 'meet first in a
careless crowd' with her pride 'that he should see how well she could
beseem/ Her present rank, yet keep her early dream' (230, 229, 231-2).
Landon at this point assumes Amenaide's point of view so that readers
see Amenaide's sincerity, but she also foreshadows trouble in Leoni's
strange absence, and sure enough, Part III balances another visual
emphasis on Amenaide's looks ('"How beautiful she looks this
evening!" burst/ From every lip' [247-8]) with Leoni's corresponding
betrayal: 'sudden came Arezzi to her side - / "Look there, the Count
Leoni and his bride!"' (283-4). It has become evident that Landon
intends each section to represent a tableau vivant, and each to advance
the melodrama by touching only on the most visually telling scenes: I
gives us a combination of Young Love/Parting/Virtue Rewarded, II
presents Awaiting the Lover's Return, III sets up The Lover's Betrayal,
while IV puts forward The Rival/The Lover Altered (these titles are my
own rather than Landon's). Where Amenaide uses pride to sustain
her, 56 Leoni is simply thoughtless, 'alter'd' (329): changed inwardly
though the same outwardly. Landon wants to dramatise sexual differ-
ence, among other things, and so Leoni's change causes him nothing
other than 'a moment's awkwardness' (326), a superficial response to
an emotional situation, while Amenaide's grief inculcates 'an evil
feeling ... / / Part bitterness, part vanity, part woe' (347, 349) that
spurs her to close the scene by Outshining the Rival.
Landon's approach is complex, for by invoking melodrama and
theatrical situations she is not merely suggesting that such scenes are
unreal, or that emotion is always necessarily feigned; instead, she indi-
cates that love itself follows a preordained path, a theatricalised script

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 Transform ig the Romance: Byron and Landon 165

familiar to readers and to the narrator, but not to the players - that
lovers, especially women, are at the mercy of love's inevitable progres-
sion from pleasure to pain. In 'Venetian Bracelet' she uses the violence
of Amenaide's emotion to represent the harm love does: the struggle
between an emotion sincerely felt and an abstract - Love - charac-

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terised by its own failure. Amenaide undergoes torture because of its
presence, conveyed in Part V's highly dramatic 'Alone!' scene:

Corpse-like she lay, - her dark hair wildly thrown

Far on the floor before her; white as stone,
As rigid stretch'd each hand, - her face was press'd
Close to the earth; and but the heaving vest
Told of some pang the shuddering frame confess'd,
She seem'd as stricken down by instant death. -
Sudden she raised her head, and gasp'd for breath;
And nature master'd misery. She sought,
Panting, the air from yonder lattice brought.
Ah, there is blood on that white lip and brow!57 -
She struggles still - in vain - she must sleep now:
She wept, childlike, till sleep began to press
Upon her eyes, for very weariness.
She sleeps! - so sleeps the wretch beside the stake:
She sleeps! - how dreadful from such sleep to wake!
(381-95)

Part VI functions as an Interlude where we are told again of

Amenaide's pride, of her faults, and of the value of her love - 'Her love
was all her nature's better part' (428).58 Like a scrim behind which the
scene is changed, Part VI both hides and makes plain a transforma-
tion, the subject of Part VII: when Amenaide awakes, the sight of
herself in the mirror nearly provokes a scream. Still young, still beau-
tiful, she is also, now, somehow monstrous: ' - that pale face, - / Why
lip and brow are sullied by the trace/ Of blood; its stain is on her
tangled hair,/ Which shroud-like hides the neck that else were bare'
(442-5). Pictured in the terms of a revenant, Amenaide returns to life
transformed, determined to deny her feelings - '"Oh, never let Leoni
know the worst:/ Tis well if he believe I changed the first. / Too much
e'en to myself has been reveal'd' (480-2) - and thereby confirming her
change from heroine to something darker. Again, melodramatic
events are put in the service of a violent overthrow of romantic love,
manifested physically on Amenaide's marked face.

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166 The Romantic Paradox

Landon eases violence into her text by way of Amenaide's self-muti-

lation. The tableaux continue, giving us Leoni's English bride's story,
itself a highly melodramatic tale of filial love and loss, and also a
description of her beauty, fair Tike morning's' (508) to rival
Amenaide's 'midnight' (244), but it is Part VIII59 that spurs the action.

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Amenaide in her grove encounters the standard 'aged Jew' who offers
her both a 'ruby cross' and a bracelet 'twisted as a serpent, whose lithe
fold/ Curl'd round the arm' and which contains the 'subtlest poison'
(557, 584, 572-3, 576). Amenaide chooses the 'fatal band' and sin, and
'the solitude of crime': That night there was another saddest scene',
and Edith 'convulsively] sobs' her life away (585, 596, 597, 604). 60
Where Byron's triangles revolve around the dead body of the loved
one, 'Venetian Bracelet' finds partial resolution in the conventional
picture of woman scorned dispatching her rival. Having introduced
murder, Landon piles event on event: in Part XI, tableau gives way to
action, as Leoni is arrested, Amenaide finds herself unable to own her
'shame' (654), Leoni is found guilty, Amenaide sends in her confes-
sion, and then disappears. During Leoni's trial, Amenaide had sat 'a
very statue, with that cold set face,/ Save that red flushes came at each
light sound,/ While the wild eyes glanced fearfully around' (656-8),
drained of humanity even as Edith had been drained of life. Love
torments Amenaide, forcing physical, emotional, and moral changes,
and finally killing her, for Part XII sees her in Leoni's cell, where she
confesses, takes the bracelet's poison, and Ties a ghastly corpse before
his feet' (708). From love to death via hate and revenge, Amenaide
invites our gaze as a spectacular example of the violent effects of love
and its inevitable deadly outcome. 'Venetian Bracelet' fetishises love
as a poison, represented by the confining, sinful bracelet that impris-
ons Amenaide, and offers the female body as the site of death and of
moralising: first Edith, then Amenaide, whose grave becomes a tourist
attraction even as her identity fades. While the tomb embodies the
crime - the serpent bracelet is prominently carved on its side - the
crime outlives the individual - 'A few brief words, that passing pity
craved - / "Pray for the wounded heart, the sinful deed";/ And, half
effaced, a name - "AMENAIDE"' (716-18). Dramatising the 'disruptive
effect of passion' (Linkin 177), Landon externalises its violence, and
we find in 'Venetian Bracelet' not so much a 'travestying of feminin-
ity' (Armstrong 325) as an exploration of its pains, a melodramatic
rendering of romance that serves to underscore its failures and its
dangers. When Amenaide kills Edith and then herself, she embodies
the destructive violence of love, staged and heightened for effect.

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 167

'Venetian Bracelet' asserts the impossibility of living happily ever

after, but more than that it suggests a poet fully aware of the pitfalls
and inadequacies of romance, with its fixations on the unreal.
'Venetian Bracelet' more than her other romances shows female
activity: agency claimed through violence. It must be noted that

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although Amenaide dies, she is not condemned for her crime;
readers are asked to pity her, and she escapes the pages of self-morti-
fication indulged in by the Giaour. In fact, although her run-in with
Love is violent, the pain is short-lived - only two days pass between
Leoni's return and Amenaide's suicide. There is time enough for
Landon to establish the 'Art of Disillusion' described by McGann and
Riess: the literal dispelling of illusion that informs all her most
highly-wrought poems of love, but she refrains from blame; no
person is at fault, not even Leoni, but rather Love itself, cast as the
only true villain in the melodrama. It is Love that makes Leoni false,
Amenaide too extreme, Edith a victim, and it is Love that focuses the
tensions between Leoni and Amenaide themselves. Melodrama
'comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of
truth and ethics' and, I would add, of Love 'have been violently
thrown into question' (Brooks 15). Landon is concerned not only
with the imperative of women to love, but of men also; while
'Venetian Bracelet' concentrates on Amenaide, Leoni is at least
allowed to justify his own change of heart, albeit briefly, while his
love for Edith is never in doubt. Landon is alive to the dependency
on Love felt by both sexes, and to the rigid demarcation of experi-
ence represented by the separate spheres - Leoni leaves Amenaide to
return to the masculine sphere of war. Women depend on men to
love them, men depend on women to submit to their love, and to
forget when they do, as Leoni shows: 'How much we give to other
hearts our tone,/ And judge of others' feelings by our own!/ Himself
was alter'd: - all he sought to do/ Was to believe that she was alter'd
too' (327-30). Far from endorsing Byron's dictum that love is
'woman's whole existence', as Mellor suggests that she does
(Romanticism and Gender, 114 passim), Landon pursues the far more
complex course of dramatising that insistence though melodramatic
overstatement, and in that way questioning its verity. She writes
romances that aim to please, but like Hemans, like Robinson, she
interweaves her stories with a problematic tendency to condemn
that which she is believed to support so unquestioningly: romantic
love. 'Venetian Bracelet' contained its violence in the home, whether
castle or cottage (or prison), but something very interesting happens

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168 The Romantic Paradox

when Landon acknowledges the existence of the outside world. Love

proves itself the enemy not only of woman's whole existence, but of
man's as well.
In 'Roland's Tower', Landon melds romance with tragedy to
produce a melodrama of masculine failure. Whereas 'Venetian

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Bracelet' played with convention in what may be called a conven-
tional way - Amenaide, though violent, nevertheless conforms to an
extreme version of rejected womanhood, and wreaks her vengeance
on her innocent rival rather than her faithless lover - 'Roland's Tower'
skilfully manipulates conventional assumptions of the separate
spheres and the behaviour and emotions thought appropriate for
each. 'Roland's Tower' collapses on its own definition of love, first
offered in the epigraph: 'Oh, Heaven! The deep fidelity of love!'
Striking in its simplicity, this epigraph gives little away, but it is
uncomfortably ambiguous: is it thankful? Admiring? Despairing? It
certainly avoids overt praise, and the exclamation 'Oh, Heaven!'
conveys more desperation than comfort. Landon follows this up by
writing a narrator whose personal experience of love, although
expressed obliquely, is far from encouraging. After comparing a ruined
convent, picturesque in its covering ivy, to 'the so false exterior of the
world' (11), she moves to a familiar memento mori, the grave; covered
in violets, it reminds her not of the transitoriness of life, but of love:

I do love violets:
They tell the history of woman's love;
They open with the earliest breath of spring;
Lead a sweet life of perfume, dew, and light;
And, if they perish, perish with a sigh
Delicious as that life. On the hot June
They shed no perfume: the flowers may remain,
But the rich breathing of their leaves is past; -
Like woman, they have lost their loveliest gift,
When yielding to the fiery hour of passion:
The violet breath of love is purity.
(18-28)

The narrator's warning is familiar, but out of place, since the poem to
follow deals with other disasters than woman's lost honour; instead,
these lines hint at a counter-story, the narrator's own, referred to
again when, in describing the poem's young lovers, Roland and
Isabelle, she bursts through their narrative with her own:

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 169

I did love once -

Loved as youth - woman - genius loves; though now
My heart is chilled and seared, and taught to wear
That falsest of false things - a mask of smiles;
Yet every pulse throbs at the memory

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Of that which has been!
(98-103)

'Roland's Tower', from the 1824 collection The Improvisatrice, predates

'Venetian Bracelet' by five years, and without that poem's prefatory
disclaimer against reading the narrator as Landon, encourages readers
to identify the tragic narrator with the bereft poet. 61 Once the narra-
tor is designated as a tragic heroine, the love story the poem recounts
is fatally coloured with the narrator's own loss: her personal experi-
ence ensures her authority in the matter of love's pain, bolstered by
the by-now dark lamentation of the epigraph. In dramatic terms, the
narrator acts as a chorus, the only player with clear sight and a grip on
the narrative, and the only one able to pinpoint the moments of
importance in the romance, to 'isolat[e the] moments of sensation'
(Armstrong 326) on which melodrama depends.
Because of the narrator's gloomy tone, the reader is discouraged
from associating young love with perfect happiness, and from reward-
ing female beauty with automatic approbation. Isabelle, blonde,
blue-eyed,62 lovely, musical, the daughter of Lord Herbert and there-
fore of the appropriate class for romance, entertains her father and
guests with 'lute/ And song' and stories of 'young Roland's deeds'
(64-5, 79). This is a new chanson de Roland, simultaneously past and
present, for even as Isabelle finishes her song with the words T would
give worlds ... to see this chief,/ This gallant Roland! I could deem
him all/ A man must honour and a woman love!' (86-8), art (the song)
transforms into reality (Isabelle's world), and a young, cloaked pilgrim
reveals himself to be Roland: 'Lady! I pray thee not recall those words,/
For I am Roland!' (89-90). Seemingly sung into being by Isabelle,
Roland immediately fulfils her expectations of his attractions, for
within two lines 'They loved; - They were beloved' (93). As she will do
in 'Venetian Bracelet', Landon skips over all romantic details: the
mere appearance of the hero means the heroine loves him, while the
beauty of the heroine automatically captures the hero's love. The
romantic script, once activated, chugs along; the players, having met,
must love, and having loved, must part. After the long digression
wherein the narrator reveals her own failed love, the poem swiftly

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170 The Romantic Paradox

moves forward in time: 'spring/ Has wedded with summer' (119-20), 63

and Roland leaves Isabelle to 'raise his vassals' (124) in Lord Herbert's
support ('Lord Herbert's towers/ Were menaced with a siege' [124-5]).
Given Roland's legendary military prowess - he is already famous in
song, as we have seen - there seems little to fear, were it not for the

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fatalistic narrator, but her experience prevails. First, Roland fails to
appear at the battle: 'Lord Herbert's banner flies/ ... / But where is he
who said that he would ride/ At his right hand to battle? - Roland!
where - / Oh! Where is Roland?' (129, 131-3). The knightly hero, late
for battle, thereby fails to fulfil his pledge to support Herbert, but he
commits a far worse blunder.

Isabelle stood upon her lonely tower;

And, as the evening-star rose up, she saw
An armed train bearing her father's banner
In triumph to the castle. Down she flew
To greet the visitors: - they had reached the hall
Before herself. What saw the maiden there?
A bier! - her father laid upon that bier!
Roland was kneeling by the side, his face
Bowed on his hands and hid; - but Isabelle
Knew the dark curling hair and stately form,
And threw her on his breast. He shrank away
As she were death, or sickness, or despair.
'Isabelle! it was I who slew thy father!'
She fell almost a corpse upon the body.
It was too true! With all a lover's speed,
Roland had sought the thickest of the fight-
He gained the field just as the crush began; -
Unwitting of his colours, he had slain
The father of his worshipped Isabelle!
(138-56)

Roland's mistake is unbelievable - an experienced knight, famed for

his skill, kills his lover's father by accident, 'unwitting of his colours',
even though he has gone to 'raise his vassals' specifically to fight for
those colours. What has gone wrong?
The clue lies buried in the romance itself. Isabelle and Roland
occupy different worlds: she, the heroine, inhabits the house of her
father, domesticated, ensconced, and waiting for love; he, the hero,
lives in the outside world, identified with war, soldierly deeds, manly

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 171

prowess. Drawn by love into Isabelle's realm, Roland is changed; the

only explanation for his mistake is that, blinded by love, he is now a
bad soldier, an inept knight, a disarmed hero. It is not the encounter
with Isabelle, but the entry into Love's world and the concomitant
sojourn in the domestic that unmans Roland, and once affected he

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never recovers. While Isabelle retires to a convent, Roland 'built/ A
tower beside the Rhine' in sight of the convent, and each night
watches for Isabelle's 'white scarf waved' to let him know she still lives
(174-5, 176).64 When she finally dies, her 'tomb/ Was Roland's death-
bed!' (187-8), the final retreat. Roland, once he has crossed into the
domestic sphere, is unable to return successfully to the world of war,
of action; even as Amenaide's foray into the world of violent action
leads directly to her death, so too Roland - as knight - cannot survive
his encounter with love. Once he 'worships' Isabelle, he has compro-
mised his masculinity: he is violently stripped of the markers of
heroism and knightly valour. The melodramatic moment of mistaken
identity, the sensationalised force of lines like 'she fell almost a corpse
upon the body', the irony inherent in 'with all a lover's speed' - surely
Roland should enter battle with a soldier's speed? - reaffirm that to
love is to invite tragedy. While it is often true that in Landon's poetry
'the woman who loves is rejected, abandoned, or merely forgotten by
her cruel lover' (Mellor 115), the man who loves suffers as well; the
villain in Landon's romances is not the faithless lover, or even the
overly-passionate woman, but Love - Romance - itself, with its
dangerous, unavoidable excesses.
Roland, marked by Love, cannot leave Isabelle, even after she has
left him; unfitted for his appropriate sphere - war - he can only wait
for death. In The Mountain Grave' (1829), Herman finds it easy to
leave Agatha, with whom, we understand, he has only dallied; his T
am not late tonight' (21) bespeaks that he has been late before.
'Mountain Grave' closes the collection introduced by 'Venetian
Bracelet', and in it Landon sketches in shorthand the violence perpe-
trated by Love. 'What oppresses the young heart like love?' the
narrator demands; 'O youth, and love, which is the light of youth,/
Why pass ye as the morning?' (14, 44-5). Again, love is doomed before
the poem's romance commences, although Herman's question itself
spells trouble: Agatha, the heroine, has 'cause' for sorrow, agrees the
narrator. Like Leoni, Herman stays only long enough to affirm love,
then he too mounts a 'snow-white steed' and goes off to war. Where
Roland finds that love has disabled him, and Leoni forgets Amenaide
in Edith's arms, Herman does not return at all:

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172 The Romantic Paradox

Ambition took the place of Love, and Hope

Fed upon fiery thoughts, aspiring aims;
And the bold warrior, favourite of his king,
If that he thought of his first tenderness,
Thought if it but with scorn, or vain excuse,

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And in her uncomplaining silence read
But what he wish'd, - oblivion; and at last
Her very name had faded, like the flower
Which we have laid upon our heart, and there
Have suffer'd it to die.
(112-21)

Herman exchanges Love for War; he successfully pursues the martial

career that chimes with masculinity and the public sphere in Landon's
poetry, while Agatha, fulfilling society's expectation that woman lives
for love, dies without it, 'in silence, without sign or word/ That might
betray the memory of her fate', except that she desires to be buried
'beneath the shade of the laburnum tree' where she used to meet
Herman (145-6, 148). Agatha pathologically fulfils woman's destiny;
her only speech describes Herman's leaving, and her total immersion
in the feminine space - she watches, waits, despairs, and dies - neces-
sitates her elimination. Landon shows the inevitable result of
passivity, not to condone, but to condemn; Agatha's death is not cele-
brated, but instead rather flatly concludes a life of fetishised
femininity. Herman's fate, too, is intimately tied to Love: when he
returns to the valley 'upon warlike mission' (172) and sees Agatha's
tomb, it forces him to recognise the strength of love.

... if he thought
Of his once love, it was but how to shun
The meek reproaching of her mournful eye,
Or else to think she had like him forgot.
But dead! - so young! - he had not dream'd of this. -
He knelt him down, and like a child he wept: -
Gentle affections struggled with, subdued -
Tenderness, long forgotten, now burst forth
Like rain drops from the summer sky. Those tears
Pass'd, and their outward trace; but in his heart
A fountain had sprung up which dried no more.
(172-82)

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 Transforming the Romance: Byron and Landon 173

As long as he rejected Love, Herman was safe: military violence, para-

doxically, proves less threatening to him than love, for as soon as he
truly feels love, Herman loses his nerve. 'He died early', and deputes
'the brother of his arms to take/ His heart, and lay it in the distant
grave/ Where Agatha was sleeping' (185, 186-8). Love, denizen of the

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domestic sphere, kills the man who feels it (and who thereby crosses
spheres) and the woman who loses it (and who thereby becomes like
a man). The clash of spheres, the fatality of love: in Landon's melo-
dramatic romances, violence is Love's guarantee.
Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou note that the melodrama
juxtaposes two competing discourses, 'two different "horizons" of
understanding and desire': it both offers plot and comments on that
plot's unsatisfactoriness (xiv), a point made also by Brooks when he
describes melodrama's tendency to 'evok[e] meanings beyond its
literal configuration' of plot (10-11). Melodrama therefore opens a
space for the unsayable; in its exaggerations can be detected critiques
of the values it so hyperbolically supports. Certainly, Landon's poems
energetically plot romance, but they just as effectively plot to destroy
it; her world of failed love, murderous women, suicide and unmanned
men posits Love not as a blessing, but as a curse, a monstrous force for
oppression leading inevitably to catastrophe. 65 Her many disillu-
sioned narrators function to comment on love's violence and darkness
even as they dutifully set up repeated scenarios of pseudo-romance -
of melodramatic tragedy. It is difficult to tell if Landon supports the
validity of separate spheres, but plainly she recognises their popular
appeal, and just as plainly she recognises their inherent incompatibil-
ity. Her romances explore the disasters attendant on such insistence
on separation; they point out the impossibility of love under such
conditions. In 'Love's Last Lesson' (1827),66 she creates a doubled
voice to drive this point home: the initial narrator who craves 'forget-
fulness' and whose apostrophe to her 'god on earth' leaves the reader
uncertain if she means a lover, or Love itself (1, 3); 67 and the embed-
ded narrator, who takes over for the first when bitterness chokes off
her song. Love both silences the first speaker, and gives her a topic;
and we easily recognise the weary, experienced tones of the second
speaker. Love's last lesson reveals its true identity: 'Joys' are felt 'at
first; but what is the result?'

Hopes that lie mute in their own sullenness,

For they have quarrell'd even with themselves;
And joys indeed like birds of Paradise:

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174 The Romantic Paradox

And in their stead despair coils scorpion-like

Stinging itself; and the heart, burnt and crush'd
With passion's earthquake, scorch'd and wither'd up,
Lies in its desolation, - this is love.
(89, 91, 92-8)

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Landon portrays Love generous enough to admit its own villainy -
after it has enslaved.
For both Byron and Landon, the melodrama amplifies the falsities
of romance: it allows for role-playing, for the overt adoption and
covert dismissal of a script. Each enhances their reappraisals of roman-
tic, heterosexual love by filtering this relationship through
melodrama: Byron subsumes it to a prevailing interest in homosocial
bonding, while Landon refuses to countenance its possibilities for
success altogether. Neither is happy with the conventional wisdom of
the romance: but both Byron's expressed aversion to and Landon's
suggestively worded acceptance of its burdens indicate an interest in
its attractions, a desire to explore its implications. Violence emerges as
contingent on, a corollary to, the preoccupations of the romance, and
while Byron and Landon construct contrasting personae to guide their
readers through Love's landscape, both return repeatedly, in common
with the writers discussed throughout this book. The pull of romance,
the allure of violence, the snares of desire: when approached,
employed and redeployed by poets during the Romantic period, the
romance offers myriad opportunities for questioning, reordering and
representing culture. For Landon and Byron, the blurring of the
romance into melodrama allows for a focused rewriting of the conven-
tions of heterosexual attraction. If, then, we find ourselves
characterising the poetry of Byron and Landon as melodramatic, it is
not because of the looseness of the term, but because they are melo-
dramatic; they feature heightened, sensationalised, overwrought
characters, storylines and conclusions. In each, we discern the generic
trappings of the romance, not the least in the poems' overriding
emphasis on love, but in each, the romance has given way before the
powerful, unstoppable flow of the melodrama. The Victorian period
will see the codification of melodrama into the familiar stagebound
theatrical experience, but what the poetical melodramas of Byron and
Landon confirm is a final transmutation, the violent overthrow of
genre by genre: the death of the Romantic romance.

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Notes

Introduction

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1 Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 129. Subsequent references will be made in the text.
2 Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (1982; New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xxi.
3 Although the romances popular during the late seventeenth-early eigh-
teenth centuries, most written or revised by Madeleine de Scudery, often
revolved around great queens - Cleopatra, Semiramis - they were
concerned to subsume the queen's personal greatness to her love-life. The
queen's importance served to show she was worthy to be romanced, rather
than worthy to rule her domain.
4 Pinch, 'Learning What Hurts: Romanticism, Pedagogy, Violence', Lessons of
Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert Gleckner
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 413. Subsequent references will be
made in the text.
5 See Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Langbauer, Women
and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1990). Both studies provide important information about
and interesting readings of the Romantic/Victorian romance.
6 I borrow the image of the ghostly genre from Jerrold Hogle, 'The Gothic
Ghost as Counterfeit and its Haunting of Romanticism: The Case of "Frost
at Midnight"', European Romantic Review 9 (1998), 283-92.
7 My discussion of the Julia and Vaudracour episode is based on the 1805
version of The Prelude, found in The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth,
ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Subsequent refer-
ences, to book and line numbers, will be made in the text.
8 Incidentally, Wordsworth also veers close to the Romantic habit of plagi-
arising; despite his intertextual citation of his 'patriot Friend' (IX: 554), he
also draws on Helen Maria Williams's Letters Written in France, published in
1790. See Gill 735, n. to p. 522. As readers of this book will see, the
Julia/Vaudracour plotline also resembles closely that of Mary Robinson's
'The Hermit of Mont-Blanc'; see Chapter 4.
9 Wordsworth 'sees' these images because of the romance he associates with
the forests of France, but it is interesting that even in his fantasising,
violence enters, not only the political violence associated with the ruined
convent, but also the sexual violence of these lines: 'anon the din/ Of bois-
terous merriment and music's roar,/ With sudden Proclamation, burst
from haunt/ Of Satyrs in some viewless glade, with dance/ Rejoicing o'er a
Female in the midst,/ A mortal Beauty, their unhappy Thrall' (IX: 459-64).
10 Vaudracour is a type of the failed hero; see Chapters 3 and 4 for further
discussions.

175

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176 Notes

11 See Michael Gamer, 'Marketing a Masculine Romance: Scott,

Antiquarianism and the Gothic', Studies in Romanticism 32 (1993), 523-49.
See also Bruce Beiderwell, 'Scott's Redgauntlet as a Romance of Power',
Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989), 273-89. Both of these articles recontex-
tualise Scott's romancing along more acceptably masculine lines: 'history'
and 'power'. Subsequent references to Gamer will be made in the text.

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12 Daniel P. Watkins, Sexual Power in British Romantic Poetry (Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida, 1996), 3.
13 Praz summarises this in his 'Note to the Second Edition' of his book. See
Praz, The Romantic Agony, tr. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970), xxiv.
14 See Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Violence of
Representation: Literature and the history of violence (London: Routledge,
1989) for a revealing collection of essays attempting exactly to engage with
the discourse of literary violence. Interestingly for the present study, The
Violence of Representation deals with 'Early Modern Culture' (the seven-
teenth century), 'Modern Culture' (the nineteenth century and after) and
'Contemporary Culture', but skips the Romantic period. It is tempting to
argue that Romantic-period literary violence has been shunted con-
veniently to the Gothic and otherwise rendered invisible. One of the aims
of The Romantic Paradox is to allow the voicing of Romantic violence.

1 Reviving the Romance: What's Love Got to Do with It?

1 Robert Southey, 'Romance', from Poems containing The Retrospect, Odes,
Elegies, Sonnets, etc., with Robert Lovell (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1795).
2 Many critics note the 'ambiguity' surrounding the romance; see, for
example, Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a
Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); David Duff, Romance
and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); Fredric Jameson, 'Magical Narratives: Romance as
Genre', New Literary History 7 (1975), 135-63; Miriam Allott, Novelists on the
Novel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959).
3 See especially 30-4 and 134-53 in Romance and Revolution.
4 Southey's gendering of love as masculine, while it conforms to the Greek
ideal (Cupid being a boy), takes on a greater significance when one realises
the extent to which his feminine Romance is concerned with the tradi-
tional masculine pursuits of war.
5 As Kate Davies argues, the American Revolution offered spectacles of
extreme violence to its 'audience' back in Britain; some common subjects
for prints were that of the king devouring his own children, and of
Britannia dismembered and bleeding. Romance offered a comforting diver-
sion from such horrors, with its ordered, balanced and streamlined ethos.
See Davies, Gender and Republicanism in Britain and America: The Meanings
of Catherine Macauley (unpublished D.Phil, thesis, University of York,
England, 1999).
6 Eric Auerbach, Mimesis, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1974), 132.

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 Notes 177

7 This becomes more troubling and much more difficult to maintain in the
1790s and into the nineteenth century.
8 Such a need will become even more apparent during the Regency; see Mark
Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 26-7, for a description of George IV's
elaborately courtly coronation ceremony.

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9 Batty, The Spirit and Influence of Chivalry (London: Elliot Stock, 1890).
Subsequent references will be made in the text.
10 Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, with the Third Elizabethan Dialogue,
ed. Edith J. Morley (London: Henry Frowde, 1911), 83, 84. Subsequent
references will be made in the text.
11 Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the
Eighteenth Century (London: The Athlone Press, 1964), 87.
12 The Percy Letters, eds David Nichol Smith and Cleanth Brooks (6 vols; Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944-61), vol. 2, 7.
13 I will discuss Dobson later in this chapter; she is rather unusual in that she
continues to produce studies of the romance, rather than stopping at one.
14 Frye, The Secular Scripture, A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 76.
15 Reeve, The Progress of Romance (Dublin: Price, Exshaw, White, Cash,
Colbert, Marchbank and Porter, 1785), 1. Subsequent references will be
made in the text.
16 One remembers that for the more ambivalent Hurd, it is in Elizabeth's
court that the romance became 'absurd'; what for Reeve is a profitable asso-
ciation between a female ruler and a feminised genre is, for Hurd, an
uncomfortable instance of gender imbalance.
17 By this time (Volume II), Euphrasia has taken on the novel, which, in its
debilitating and depressing realism, seems a stronger adversary than even
Hortensius' scepticism.
18 As if to underscore her point, Reeve earlier has Euphrasia herself (ironi-
cally?) try out Hortentius' politesse:

Euphrasia. You know your advantages, and that a woman is your oppo-
nent.
Hortentius. Whether you mean me a compliment or a reproof, is not
clear' (11).

In this exchange, Reeve seems to be signalling her own authorial disregard

for such patronising codes.

19 The reader notes that devotion to the opposite sex does not feature in
Euphrasia's list of heroic qualities.
20 'Dialogue XXVIII', from Dialogues of the Dead, in Novel and Romance
1700-1800, A Documentary, ed. loan Williams (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1970), 226. Subsequent references, to 'Montagu, Novel and
Romance', will be made in the text.
21 By the 1790s, the dilemma is between an ideal that ennobles, and an exag-
geration that debases, the mind.
22 From On Fable and Romance, in Novel and Romance, 319. Subsequent refer-

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178 Notes

ences, to 'Beattie, Novel and Romance', will be made in the text.

23 The Literary History of the Troubadours. Containing their Lives, Extracts from
the Works, And many Particulars relative to the Customs, Morals, and History
of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Collected and Abridged from the French
of Mr. De Saint-Pelaie, By the Author of the Life of Plutarch (London: T. Cadell,
1779), v, vi. Subsequent references, to History, will be made in the text.

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24 Dobson here anticipates the language that will be used against the French
Revolution by those disillusioned by Robespierre's Reign of Terror; they,
too, will see the romance of liberty, fraternity and equality degenerate into
bloody scenes.
25 In light of the argument this book advances - that the romance pervades
this period as an organising, as well as a vexed, metaphor - the standard
female-authored prefatory disclaimer takes on a new resonance, but a thor-
ough investigation of this aspect is beyond the scope of this book.
26 Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry. To Which are Added, The Anecdotes of the Times,
from the Romance Writers and Historians of those Ages. Translated from the
French of Monsieur de St.Palaye, by the Translator of the Life of Plutarch
(London: J. Dodsley, 1784), vii, viii. Subsequent references, to Memoirs, will
be made in the text. As her use of 'rescue' shows, Dobson continues to
appeal to the language of chivalry despite herself.
27 Dobson refers to medieval France, but the ramifications for her own time
are clear.
28 Hugh Murray, The Morality of Fiction; or, An Inquiry into the Tendency of
Fictitious Narratives, with Observations on Some of the Most Eminent
(Edinburgh: Mundell and Son, 1805), 20; and The Works of Tobias Smollett,
M.D. with Memoirs of his Life; to which is prefixed A View of the
Commencement and Progress of Romance, by John Moore, M.D. (London: B.
Law et al, 1797), xv. Subsequent references to these works will be made in
the text.
29 Robinson, Hubert de Sevrac (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1796), 5.
Subsequent references will be made in the text.
30 See Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English
Gentleman.
31 Burke's language throughout his lamentation is determinedly romantic:

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France,

then the dauphiness, at Versaille; and surely never lighted on this orb,
which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her
just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she
just began to move in, - glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and
splendour, and joy. Oh! W h a t . . . an heart must I have, to contemplate
without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream ... that
I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of
gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought
ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge
even a look that threatened her with insult. - But the age of chivalry is
gone. - That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded;
and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

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 Notes 179

See Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain

Societies in London Relative to that Event, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 169-70.
32 See my book Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) for a discussion of the gendered and
cultural significance of disinterestedness and abstract thought.

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33 In light of this discussion, Burke's sustained argument against the need for
a written constitution is telling; for Burke, chivalry was exactly, and the
only, constitution Britain needed.
34 From The Tea-Table, or a Conversation between some Polite Persons of both
sexes at a Lady's Visiting Day, in Novel and Romance, 83.
35 From The History of Romances, An Enquiry into their Origin; Instructions for
composing them; An Account of the most Eminent Authors; With Characters
amd Curious Observations upon the Best Performances of that Kind, tr. Stephen
Lewis (1715), in Novel and Romance, 54. Subsequent references, to 'Huet,
Novel and Romance', will be made in the text.
36 The number and scale of alternatives, however, proves the instability and
riskiness of this enterprise.
37 From 'On Fictitious History', in Lectures on Rhetoric and Poetry (1762), in
Novel and Romance, 247.
38 One could describe this paradox as a type of the returned repressed; in
Gillian Beer's words, the romance represents 'not simply [what is] unreal
or artificial. Rather, it expresses the lost or repressed emotional forces of
the imagination, which they sought to release' {The Romance [London:
Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1970], 60-1). The tension between expression and
repression is the nexus of violence.
39 From Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse (1773), in Novel and Romance,
281. Subsequent references, to 'Barbauld, Novel and Romance', will be made
in the text.
40 From The Microcosm 26 (14 May 1787), in Novel and Romance, 341.
41 From Vicessimus Knox, 'On Novel Reading', no. XIV, Essays Moral and
Literary (1778), in Novel and Romance, 305.
42 Barbauld's language anticipates contemporary arguments against the dead-
ening effect of ever-more-horrific slasher films and explicit visual and
textual violence. In terms of the period under discussion here, it is also
conceivable that the immersion in romanticised violence made many
liberal thinkers fear that the violence of their society would not affect the
young deeply enough to make them want to change society for the better.

2 Sexing the Romance: the Erotic Violence of the Delia

Cruscans
1 William Gifford, The Baviad, The Baviad and Maeviad (London, 1800), 41.
2 As McGann says, 'If we want to reacquire an understanding of Delia
Cruscan poetry, Gifford's fustian points us in the right direction'. See The
Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996), Chapter 9: 'The Literal World of the English Delia Cruscans', 75.
Subsequent references to McGann will be made in the text.

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180 Notes

3 Otherwise known as Robert Merry and Hannah Cowley. When discussing

Delia Cruscan poetry, I will use their Delia Cruscan names; much of the
romance of Delia Cruscanism depends on the personae created by these
two poets. Their readers saw them as Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda; their
true identities were unimportant to the emotive relationship they built up.
Similarly, Mary Robinson becomes Laura; and, later, Charlotte Dacre (itself

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a pseudonym, according to Adrianna Craciun and Kim Ian Michasiw) 'is'
Rosa Matilda. For an engaging discussion of the theatricality of Delia
Cruscan names, see Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry,
and Spectatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), Chapter 3: '"That
fluttering, tinselled crew": Women Poets and Delia Cruscanism'. Pascoe
also supplies a useful brief history of the trend. Subsequent references to
Pascoe will be made in the text.
4 The nineteenth-century flavour of this process - hook readers through the
ephemeral medium of the newspaper, and then allow them the full enjoy-
ment of the story in the expensive permanency of a book - goes some way
towards inflecting the Delia Crusca/Anna Matilda romance with another
sort of eroticism: that of commerce.
5 Some novels made it their express aim to challenge this stereotype; see, for
instance, Amelia by Henry Fielding (1751/52), Agreeable Ugliness by Sarah
Scott (1754), Camilla by Frances Burney (1796), and Something New by
Anne Plumptre (1801). Here, inner beauty is matched with outer ugliness,
which tests and ultimately defeats the morally upright suitors - the roman-
tic necessity of beauty is upheld even as the beauty/goodness paradigm is
challenged. In the nineteenth century, sensation fiction capitalised on this
assumption by allying beauty, not with goodness, but with evil; see, espe-
cially, M.E. Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (1862).
6 See Bostetter, 'The Original Delia Cruscans and the Florence Miscellany',
Huntingdon Library Quarterly 19 (1956), 277-300; Hargreaves-Mawdsley,
The English Delia Cruscans and Their Time, 1783-1828 (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1967).
7 Indeed, for a short time Merry himself wondered if Anna Matilda was
Seward. See Hargreaves-Mawdsley, 175.
Susan Wolfson, in '"Romantic Ideology" and the Values of Aesthetic
Form', quotes from a 1796 essay in the Monthly Magazine, 'Is Verse essen-
tial to Poetry?', in which the author asserts that metre 'confin[es] the
productions of the muses within the enclosure of measured lines' and that
poetry itself is 'confin[ed] within the narrow inclosure of metre'. For this
author, poetic formality performs exactly the function I am suggesting: it
serves to imprison the power and energy poetry might otherwise unleash.
Wolfson's excellent essay is found in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George
Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 188-218.
Subsequent references will be made in the text.
8 These engravings offer further evidence of the rote nature of the romance
followed by Anna Maria and Delia Crusca. While the two are represented
in differing poses - Delia Crusca has his head on his right hand and looks
at his viewer, and Anna Matilda holds a book open in her left hand, holds
her right hand at her waist, and looks off to the left with a half-smile on
her face - both are set within an oval inscribed at its base with the sitter's

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 Notes 181

name. More importantly, the background to Delia Crusca's portrait (a

Muse-figure above him; billing doves under him; bow, arrows and torch to
his lower left; lyre, flute and quill to his lower right) is reused in reverse in
Anna Matilda's: the two portraits function as mirror-images, even as their
likenesses reflect each other's passion.
9 Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 28.

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10 Brooks, 'Aesthetics and Ideology - What Happened to Poetics?', in
Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. Levine, 155. Subsequent references will be made
in the text.
11 Maria Dibattista, '"Sabbath Eyes": Ideology and the Writer's Gaze', in
Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. Levine, 169. Subsequent references will be made
in the text.
12 The most significant romantic exchange in the text, the Anna
Matilda/Delia Crusca correspondence, will be discussed in the next section
of the chapter.
13 'Ode to Mrs. Siddons', The British Album, In Two Volumes (London: John
Bell, 1792), 1, 18, 22, 25, 29, 33. Subsequent references to poems from The
British Album will be to line numbers and made in the text. The power of
Siddons' voice is such that Madness itself is driven mad: 'Dancing upon the
flinty plain/ As tho' 'twere gay to suffer pain,I That sees his tyrant Moon, and
raving runs to woo' (34-6).
14 Wells's artlessness can, of course, like Siddons' pathos, be seen as artful -
as derived from her artistic prowess. Delia Crusca wants his readers to see
Wells as sincere, activated by genuine emotions rather than the artifice of
acting. In this way she is a more suitable romantic object.
15 See Wolfson, 194.
16 Anna Matilda also promotes this doctrine; it is what allows her to see
through Delia Crusca's disguise as 'Leonardo'. See the discussion of their
romance, below.
17 The slightly threatening tone of Emma's verse - the promise of eternal
clinging - anticipates the suffocating grasp of some of Felicia Hemans's
heroines in Records of Woman; see Chapter 4.
18 In The British Album, the gaze always focuses on the female body, with the
exception of Emma's Henry.
19 This phrasing - 'produced by the pen of Delia Crusca' - allows Delia Crusca
to occupy a passive position, as if his pen has more volition than he does,
and is liable to go off on romantic tangents. It also enhances the artifice of
Delia Crusca himself, who is, as I have noted, no more than a name.
20 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of Letitia Landon's version of 'unhappily
ever after'.
21 William Keach, '"Words Are Things": Romantic Ideology and the Matter of
Poetic Language', in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. Levine, 228.
22 Indeed, in her clever combining of youth and age in her poem (we see
auburn hair and the slim form as clearly as the 'snow' and 'warped' body),
Anna Matilda maintains her physical attractiveness as well.
23 Pascoe asserts that 'the ongoing and primary preoccupation of each pseu-
donymous poet [in The British Album] is not the other's physical body but
rather the other's body of verse' (76). While certainly the corpus comes
into it, I argue instead that the physical body and the body of verse are

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182 Notes

identical in Delia Cruscan poetry, and are made so by the poets' firm
conflation of sensation and style.
24 At this point, the Delia Cruscan romance reifies 'the discursively
constructed values of male authority and female contingency'. However,
the plot will thicken: neither player willingly occupies their standard
romance role for long. The quotation is from Laura Runge, Gender and

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Language in British Literary Criticism, 1660-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 211.
25 In addition, Anna Matilda embeds in this poem a critique of Delia Crusca's
stuffy poetic style:
And be thy lines irregular and free,
Poetic chains should fall before such Bards as thee.
Scorn the dull laws that pinch thee round,
Raising about thy verse a mound,
O'er which thy muse, so lofty! dares not bound.
Bid her in verse meand'ring sport;
Her footsteps quick, or long, or short
Just as her various impulse wills -
Scorning the frigid square, which her fine fervour chills.
(13-21)
Anna Matilda schools Delia Crusca in a more lively style, allowing her
poetic structure to exemplify her advice.
26 In this Anna Matilda anticipates Letitia Landon, whose narrators and hero-
ines always suffer at the hands of Love; see Chapter 5.
27 This contrasts with Anna Matilda's first response to Delia Crusca's power.
It is part of Anna Matilda's - or rather, Hannah Cowley's - subtlety as a
poet that Delia Crusca's poetic power is rendered as a form of penetration,
thus underpinning the eroticism of the Delia Cruscan romance.
28 Delia Crusca counters Anna Matilda's frequent penetration imagery with
images of swelling and bursting - clearly, both poets understood and
exploited the sexuality of their romance.
29 Even as she sends him away, Anna Matilda reveals her feelings for Delia
Crusca, calling him 'my Delia Crusca' and worrying that Florence, his puta-
tive destination, might tempt him away from her memory.
30 One remembers Anna Matilda's initial description of her auburn locks
sprinkled with snow.
31 One can also speculate that hiding behind Anna Matilda's sorrow is a
mischievous Cowley.
32 Arley's poems are the bane of The British Album, although also the most
overtly sexual. They are concerned with sexual conquest and with warning
susceptible young women about the lascivious world and the conse-
quences of lost virtue. In poems about ravished maids and premarital sex,
both implicit and explicit ('Tho' I boast not the name, I've the Truth of a
Wife'; 'and does she hold her Spoiler dear?'), Arley consistently casts
himself as a doomed romantic hero. He also writes 'Love Renew'd. A
Sonnett', which consists of nine 4-line stanzas.
33 It is significant that Mary Robinson's posthumously published Poetical
Works contain a poem entitled 'To Leonardo', which, as its repetition of
key words and direct responses to key sentences from 'To Laura' show,

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 Notes 183

originally directly followed Leonardo/Delia Crusca's offering. This poem's

opening lines show Laura's suspicion of Leonardo's motives: 'And dost
thou hope to fan my flame/ With the soft breath of FRIENDSHIP'S name?'
(1-2). The romance in The British Album, however, depends upon a
constant Delia Crusca, and omits a poem that calls into question his disin-
terested offer of 'friendship'. Even Laura - that is, Robinson (or perhaps

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Robinson's editor) - colludes in the cover-up, as 'To Leonardo' is hidden
without comment or context deep in Volume III of the collected poems.
See Robinson, The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson: including
Many Pieces Never Before Published (3 vols; London: Richard Phillips, 1806).
34 Anna Matilda is subtle, but the implication remains: Man's sagacious Art
could just as easily be the ability to tell plausible lies as it is poetic skill.
35 These lines further the artifice of the poem: although spoken in Delia
Crusca's voice, the lines are italicised, and hence, in the typography of the
poem, actually written by Anna Matilda. She, then, ventriloquises Delia
Crusca at the moment of her own dissolution: 'MATILDA fled! the closing
Night pursued,/ And the cold INGRATE scarce I longer view'd;/ Her form grew
indistinct - each step more dim,/ And now a distant vapour seems to swim,/ Her
white robe glistens on my eye no more,/Its strainings all are vain - the fond delu-
sion's o'er' (96-101). He, conversely, takes over at the moment she
disappears: 'MY SONG subsides' begins the next (unitalicised) line (102).
36 Considering that all along Anna Matilda has allowed her mind to stand in
for her body, that 'another' will now claim her mind is simply a way of
saying that her body has been claimed: contact is inevitably sexualised.
37 This poem contains lines that may have worked upon a reader whose own
early poetry was susceptible to the Delia Cruscan influence, Coleridge:
How would I write of dear PHILANDER dead!
O! I would weave such verse, that round my head
The Demons of the Night,
Arrested in their wheeling flight,
Should learn to pity and to mourn,
And curse their bounded pow'r,
Which would not let them say RETURN! RETURN!
(38-44)
The rhythmic resonances of 'Kubla Khan' are suggestive.
38 This poem appends a note that both admits Delia Crusca's philandering
and implicitly confesses to Delia Cruscan playacting: 'A FURIOUS modern
SATIRIST [Gifford?], who cannot in any manner moderate his rage at the
success which Mr. MERRY's Poetry has met with, under the signature of
DELLA CRUSCA, falls foul on him in DESPERATION, and ACTUALLY
charges him with the HEINOUS OFFENCE of POETICAL INCONSTANCY,
for having addressed LOVE-VERSES to a VARIETY of WOMEN. The justice
of the accusation cannot SERIOUSLY be denied!! All that we can say is, that
we hope Mr. MERRY's MUSE will behave with more fidelity in future!'

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184 Notes

3 Failing the Romance: Coleridge, Keats and the Wilted

Hero
1 As Stuart Curran emphasises, 'the aim of most quest-romances is ... inner
fulfillment' (Poetic Form and British Romanticism [New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986], 142). Because the conversation poems offer such an

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intriguing rewriting of the heroic quest, I have chosen to focus on them
rather than the more obvious romances written by Coleridge such as
Christabel, 'Alice du Clos', 'Love', 'The Ballad of the Dark Ladie', etc.
Unmistakably, these romances turn to violence to resolve narrative uncer-
tainty, most especially 'Alice du Clos', where masculine jealousy leads
directly to the murder of the heroine. In addition, the fragmentary nature of
the poems, and the speaker's frequent inability to describe what he sees (as in
Christabel: 'a sight to dream of, not to tell'), point to a narrative difficulty:
even when he is not the target of his own constructs of poetic violence,
Coleridge its unable to complete the act. Violence is thus created through its
deflection, a technique also evident in Mary Robinson; see Chapter 4. Despite
Coleridge's self-proclaimed dedication to love - 'Love is the vital air of my
Genius' (see Letters, vol. I, p. 471), in his poems it is rendered as fruitless and
failed, fragmentary and aborted. See, for instance, Anthony Harding,
Coleridge and the Idea of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974);
Edward Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1963), Chapter 3; and Jeanie Watson, Risking
Enchantment: Coleridge's Symbolic World of Faery (London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1990).
2 Claudine Herrmann, Les Voleuses de langue, in Nancy K. Miller, 'The Text's
Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions' (Feminist Literary Criticism, ed.
Mary Eagleton [New York: Longman Inc., 1991], 62. Translation by Miller).
Although Miller's essay focuses on female subjectivity, the romance vocab-
ulary both in her essay's title and in the quotation from Herrmann indicate
the infusion of romance ideology in the construction of sexual relations
and gender identity. Herrmann's quotation points to the expected heroic
behavioural paradigms of masculinity.
3 And, of course, by genre; Keats's unabashed writing of romances
conformed to critical expectations of his abilities, as informed by his class,
but also marked him as a writer of feminine verse. Hazlitt's well-known
judgement that 'the fault of Mr Keats's poems was a deficiency in mascu-
line energy of style' serves as one example (from Essay XXV in Table-Talk:
or, Original Essays, 1822; found in Keats: The Narrative Poems, A Casebook,
ed. John Spencer Hill [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983], 48).
4 Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen and Co., 1970), 10. Subsequent refer-
ences will be made in the text.
5 Levy, The Sword from the Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), 211.
6 Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London: Macmillan Press, 1966), 91, 97. Subsequent
references will be made in the text.
7 Reed, Meditations on the Hero (1974; New Haven: Yale University Press,
1978), 10. Subsequent references will be made in the text.
8 Bishop, The Romantic Hero and his Heirs in French Literature (New York: Peter
Lang, 1984), 2, 4, 5. Subsequent references will be made in the text.

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 Notes 185

Although Bishop studies mainly French literature, in his general comments

on the heroic identity he draws on English and American literature as well.
9 See, for instance, Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London:
Routledge, 1993); Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989); Jacqueline M. Labbe, Romantic Visualities:
Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Tim

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Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the
Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hazlitt
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
10 Marlon Ross, 'Romantic Quest and Conquest: Troping Masculine Power in
the Crisis of Poetic Identity', Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 48. Subsequent references
will be made in the text.
11 A spectacular example of an attempt to get around this difficulty is
Wordsworth's Prelude, an epic romance of the self that is determinedly
heroic but also, in its focus on a single subjectivity, determinedly detached
from culture. At least, that would seem to be Wordsworth's quest.
12 Robinson, The Current of Romantic Passion (Madison, WI: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 1991), 74, emphasis added. Subsequent references will be
made in the text.
13 Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 20. Subsequent references will be made in
the text.
14 Edward E. Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists, 93.
15 Gerald Enscoe, Eros and the Romantics (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 166.
16 Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Romantic Quest (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1931), 335.
17 Ironically, this staccato style is mirrored in some work on Coleridge; specif-
ically, Richard Holmes's biography, the second part of which did not
appear until nine years after the first, but which has been hailed as a work
of deep intelligence. See Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder
and Stoughton, 1989), and Coleridge: Darker Reflections (New York:
HarperCollins, 1998).
18 This is more openly displayed in what Jeanie Watson calls his tales of
Faery; see Risking Enchantment.
19 This frailty is used poetically in 'The Lime-Tree Bower my Prison', but it is
also evinced in Coleridge's well-documented nightmares, addictions and
emotional excesses, all of which further underscore his tendency towards
sensibility.
20 For further discussions of these hero-types, see Thorslev, The Byronic Hero
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 27-50 passim. The
Gothic finds more play, of course, in a poem like Christabel, but it also
makes its appearance in, for instance, the unearthly quiet and fluttering
'stranger' in 'Frost at Midnight'.
21 Tellingly, Coleridge begins his quest having already apparently gained one
of the main rewards offered by the romance - the love of a fair maid;
however, as Kelvin Everest notes, the love union in Coleridge's handling is
idealised into impossibility. See Everest, Coleridge's Secret Ministry (Sussex:
Harvester Press, 1979), 46 passim. Subsequent references to Everest will be
made in the text.

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186 Notes

22 'The Eolian Harp', The Oxford Authors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. HJ.
Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 1 1, 7, 2, 3. Subsequent
references, to line numbers, are to this edition and will be made in the text.
23 With its emphasis on stillness, 'Harp' institutes a trope common to all the
poems.
24 This image, with its echoes of Marvell and 'Kubla Khan', indicates the eroti-

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cism that Coleridge mingles freely with his romanticising. See, for instance,
Harding, Coleridge and the Idea of Love; and Everest, Coleridge's Secret
Ministry. Jerome McGann notes that the young Coleridge was influenced by
the Delia Cruscans, whose eroticism was discussed in Chapter 2: see 'Mary
Robinson and the Myth of Sappho' (Modern Language Quarterly 56 [1995]),
56, n. 3; and The Poetics of Sensibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
25 Bygrave, Coleridge and the Self (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), 109; and see
108 passim. Subsequent references will be made in the text.
26 In both 'Harp' and 'Reflections' Coleridge constructs the cot as a kind of
Sleeping Beauty's palace, covered over with vines, and impenetrable.
27 For a full discussion of the ramifications of the prospect view during the
Romantic period, see my book, Romantic Visualities.
28 Oh! What a goodly scene! Here the bleak mount,
The bare bleak mountain speckled thin with sheep;
Grey clouds, that shadowing spot the sunny fields;
And river, now with bushy rocks o'er-browed,
Now winding bright and full, with naked banks;
And seats, and lawns, the Abbey and the wood,
And cots, and hamlets, and faint city-spire;
The Channel there, and Islands and white sails,
Dim coasts, and cloud-like hills, and shoreless Ocean —
(29-37, emphasis added)
The repetition of 'and' enhances the biblical tone; this is Coleridge the
visionary.
29 The matter-of-fact tone of the headnote is in contrast to the overwrought
claims in the poem's first lines of loss and isolation; it seems more melo-
drama than romance to exclaim that he 'never more may meet again' his
visiting friends. Indeed, what stands out in the first stanza is not the
speaker's imprisonment but his relative freedom to roam.
30 An alternative reading would argue that Charles continues to stand in for
Coleridge, and therefore the closing turn to him represents a coded turn to
Coleridge's own sensibility. This displacement loses its force, however, as
soon as Coleridge returns to his own perspective in the last stanza.
31 The speaker's designation of his family as 'the inmates of my cottage'
heightens the suggestion of imprisonment; even during Coleridge's time,
'inmate' carried negative connotations. See the OED's secondary definition
of the word: 'one not originally or properly belonging to the place where
he dwells; a foreigner, stranger. Often fig.'. The figurative nature of this
definition makes it particularly suitable for Coleridge's poem, which relies
so heavily on metaphor, while the synonym 'stranger' chimes with the
image of the fluttering ash that transfixes the speaker.
32 Bygrave says that the 'satisfying "return upon itself" [that closes] the poem...
reveal[s] itself as continuation rather than closure of the circle' (129). In this

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 Notes 187

way, it resembles a maze or labyrinth in which the hero, trapped, repeatedly

returns upon himself rather than finding (or making) resolution.
33 In all six poems, but especially in the last two, Coleridge concentrates the
imagery of quietness to the point that it seems marvellous he can say
anything at all. Given the nature of his quest and its almost-eager failure, one
might say that the imagery indicates an awareness that what he is saying

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must be nearly inaudible if it's even to be said. This echoes Coleridge's strat-
egy in Christabel, previously noted, where the fragmentary nature of the
poem, matched with speaker's carefully chosen moments of speechlessness,
allow Coleridge both to write and not to write his Gothic horrors.
34 One could read the introduction of the lord's deserted castle as somehow
an example of the nightingale's song, but this requires a stretch and at any
rate only further establishes the vexed nature of that song.
35 It is tempting to read the absent lord as another speaker-proxy, one who
has escaped the confines of a failed and circular quest.
36 Although it is, of course, 'a Poetic Romance', Endymion does not form a
part of this chapter. In this poem Keats is still working through a devotion
to 'old romance', and Endymion itself offers few challenges to the form. See
Nancy Moore Goslee, The Envisioning of Women: from Endymion to the
Later Romantics', Approaches to Teaching Keats's Poetry, eds Walter H. Evert
and Jack W. Rhodes (New York: Modern Language Association of America,
1991), 112-19; Ronald A. Sharp, 'Keats's Endymion', Explicator 37 (1979),
24; Miriam Allott, 'Keats's Endymion and Shelley's "Alastor"', Literature of
the Romantic Period, 1750-1850, eds R. T. Davies and Bernard G. Beatty
(New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976), 151-70; Stuart M. Sperry, Jr, 'The
Allegory of Endymion', Studies in Romanticism 2 (1962), 38-53.
37 Stillinger, The Hoodwinking of Madeline (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1971), 31. 'Detested moods' and 'new Romance' come from Keats, The
Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (2 vols; Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, 262-3, and are found in Stillinger,
31. Subsequent references to Stillinger will be made in the text.
38 In this way Stillinger positions himself as hero, rescuing the text from
obscurity. Isabella is still under-regarded; without by any means regarding
it as a failure, I too seek to rescue it from its usual position as 'just a
romance'.
39 Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory (Oxford: Blackwells Ltd, 1988), 5.
Subsequent references will be made in the text.
40 Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative , tr. Sue Bollans (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 30.
41 See Romanticism and Gender, Part HI, pp. 171-186.
42 Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in Keats: The Narrative Poems, A
Casebook, ed. John Spencer Hill, 27. Subsequent references to materials
found in Spencer Hill will be made in the text.
43 This can be compared with Coleridge's interest in Christabel's well-being:
'Jesu, Maria, shield her well!' and 'O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!'
(1:54, 254).
44 van Ghent, Keats: The Myth of the Hero, rev. and ed. Jeffrey Cane Robinson
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Subsequent references will
be made in the text.

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188 Notes

45 There are also competing explanations of the versions; Elizabeth Cook's

1990 Oxford Authors edition states that 'The alterations made in the
Indicator versions may have been made by Hunt. If they are Keats's own
revisions they were made at a time of serious ill health which may well
have led to a failure of nerve and loss of confidence in earlier judgements'.
H.W. Garrod's 1956 edition, however, declares 'that its variants go back to

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Keats himself, and are not the work of Hunt, [which] seems sufficiently
indicated by the fact that John Jeffry had a manuscript of the poem, in
Keats's autograph, in which the first line was given as its appears in the
Indicator'. See Cook, The Oxford Authors: John Keats (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 601, and Garrod, Keats: The Poetical Works (1956;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 465.
For discussions of the Knight's culpability, see Karen Swann, 'Harassing the
Muse', Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988), 81-92; and Labbe, Romantic Visualities, 107-12.
46 The persistent undervaluing of the romance as unworthy of a mature
poet's consideration is reflected in such attempts to import philosophy - a
'higher' intellectual pursuit - into the poem. While such approaches can
be illuminating, they all depend on the assumption that any meaning in
the romance is self-evident and plot-led; that is, once recognised as a
romance, the romance itself has been thoroughly explicated, and it is time
to start allegorising the players.
47 See Swann, 88, 87.
48 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', The Oxford Authors: John Keats, ed. Elizabeth
Cook, 15, 16. Subsequent references to Keats's poetry will be to this edition
and will be made in the text.
49 This dismissal functions overtly, but in his oppression of the Dame, the
Knight/wight actually embodies the dark side of chivalry. See Chapter 1.
50 Enscoe, 135. The Wasserman quote is drawn from The Finer Tone
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), 74.
51 In this way Keats can be said to vampirise his poetic creations: they become
useful only for what they have to offer.
52 I will discuss the romances in the order in which they appeared in the 1820
volume; as with Coleridge's conversation poems, they make up a sequence
of violence that surges, peaks, and then falls back: detumescence. For a
discussion of the 1820 romances as paradoxically supporting and rejecting
romance values, see Tilottama Raj an, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of
Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).
53 Paradoxically, of course, this results in increased desire; the Odes perform
a kind of tease with their pictures of lush sensuality held in stasis.
54 David Perkins is thoroughly unimpressed: Lycius 'has little to characterize
him except an extraordinary capacity for wish-fulfillment, a desire to
retreat with his vision, and a lack of flexibility' (The Quest for Permanence:
The Symbolism of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats [Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1959], 265). For most critics, it seems, Lycius is a strangely
uncompelling hero; the implied question is, what does Lamia see in him?
55 In this opening non-encounter Lamia claims the masculine sense of vision;
Lycius is the objectified sexual attraction.
56 See Spencer Hill, 31, n. 1.

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 Notes 189

57 And last, pointing to Corinth, ask'd her sweet,

If 'twas too far that night for her soft feet.
The way was short, for Lamia's eagerness
Made, by a spell, the triple league decrease
To a few paces; not at all surmised
By blinded Lycius, so in her comprized.

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They pass'd the city gates, he knew not how,
So noiseless, and he never thought to know.
(1:342-9)
Lycius' concern for Lamia is undercut by the narrator's switch to Lamia's
'eagerness' and her ability to shorten the distance home without Lycius'
even noticing. Again, he is 'blind', bereft of his masculine vision, while
Lamia directs and controls their course and destination.
58 Lycius' habitual shrinking functions descriptively; he personifies the
detumescence that Keats uses to compromise his heroes' status.
59 See Chapter 4 for a thorough discussion of the trope of the dead man in
the romances of Mary Robinson and Felicia Hemans. This chapter offers
the corollary vision of the disempowered hero.
60 Even as Lycius plays the part of the tyrant, he lacks the necessary equip-
ment for 'swelling'; that is, he continues to be associated with shrinkage.
61 This scene implies that, for Lorenzo and Isabella, love lives in the head, not
the body or the heart; one remembers how it originally entered through
the eyes and ears, with fond gazes and sighs. But it also connotes a phallic
dismemberment, especially in the fertility the head comes to symbolise. It
is not so much 'head' as 'member', and in its decay Keats suggests another
form of detumescence.
62 Boccaccio is more restrained: 'having brought a keen Razor with her, by
help of the nurse, she divided the Head from the Body, [and] wrapped it
up in a Napkin'. See Stillinger, 40 passim.
63 In this way Keats once again indicates the association between romance
heroism and the culture of gender. For a fuller discussion of Porphyro's
perfidy, see Stillinger, 67-93. In addition, 'melting' continues the associa-
tion of heroic action with softness; where the Knight/wight withered,
Lycius shrank, and Lorenzo decayed, Porphyro melts. In all four romances,
the hero simply cannot remain whole and hard.
64 Concise Oxford Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 946.

4 Interrupting the Romance: Robinson, Hemans and

Dead Men
1 Although by no means its only centre: she also relies on satire, comedy and
autobiography, as critics such as Judith Pascoe, Stuart Curran, Lisa Vargo
and others have shown. See Pascoe, 'Mary Robinson and the Literary
Marketplace', Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, eds Paula
Feldman and Theresa Kelley (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England, 1995), 252-68; Curran, 'Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in
Context', Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776-1837, eds
Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of

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190 Notes

Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 7-35; and Vargo, 'The Claims of "real life and
manners": Coleridge and Mary Robinson', The Wordsworth Circle 26 (1995),
134-7.
2 Clery's original phrase is 'Romance recognises that the gentlewoman is
bound by the metaphorics of appearance, that her mind is of necessity
given over to superstition'. See The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the

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1790s', Reviewing Romanticism, eds Philip Martin and Robin Jarvis
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 73. Subsequent references will be made in
the text.
3 See Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York:
Harper and Row, 1977). This shift is, of course, almost completely class-
bound, but so, too, is the world of the romance (and its readers); with only
a few exceptions, it is populated by an incongruous number of Ladies,
Barons, disguised princes and princesses, and so on. See also Leonore
Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English
Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987).
4 Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: the Codification of Intimacy, tr. Jeremy
Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 122, 127, origi-
nal emphasis. Subsequent references will be made in the text.
5 Penelope Harvey and Peter Gow, Sex and Violence: Issues in representation
and experience (London: Routledge, 1994), 2. Subsequent references will be
made in the text.
6 For instance, the refusal by the villagers of Racedown to believe that
William and Dorothy Wordsworth really were brother and sister and not
illicit lovers posing as brother and sister relies on a romantic reconstruc-
tion of reality as informed by transgression and violence against social
codes and mores.
7 One such target was Mary Robinson; see this chapter, below. Also see
Pascoe, '"The Spectacular Flaneuse": Mary Robinson and the City of
London', The Wordsworth Circle 23 (1992), 165-71; Jan Fergus and Janice
Farrar Thaddeus, 'Women, Publishers, and Money, 1790-1820', Studies in
Eighteenth-Century Culture 17 (1987), 191-207; Robert Bass, The Green
Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (London:
Redman, 1957).
8 Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, 'Cultural difference and the lust to
kill', in Sex and Violence, eds Harvey and Gow, 160. Subsequent references
will be made in the text.
9 Letitia Landon also explores this connection, presenting female violence as
an inevitable result of thwarted love; see Chapter 5.
10 Although the woman, it must be noted, does not always survive, she often
does, while the man seldom does.
11 The romantic world of Robinson and Hemans is determinedly heterosex-
ual.
12 Curran, 31. Curran sees Robinson's romantic poetry as reflecting her own
condition of powerlessness and victimisation; as if she is a character of her
own making, she personifies the ceaseless loop of romantic desire and
rejection found in her poems. My reading sees Robinson as more active, a
creator of poetry rather than a passive mirror of her life's events.
13 For biographical information on Robinson, see Robert Bass, The Green

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 Notes 191

Dragoon; M. J. Levy, Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson (1758-1800)

(London: Peter Owen, 1994); Judith Pascoe, 'Mary Robinson and the
Literary Marketplace'; and Stuart Curran, 'Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in
Context'.
14 See Jan Fergus and Janice Farrar Thaddeus, 'Women, Publishers, and
Money, 1790-1820', for a reproduction of this print; like Curran, they

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emphasise the personal effect on Robinson of this kind of representation.
15 For more discussions of Robinson's habitual self-fashioning, see Judith
Pascoe; Eleanor Ty, 'Engendering a Female Subject: Mary Robinson's
(Re)Presentations of the Self (English Studies in Canada 21 [1995], 407-31);
and Sharon Setzer, 'Mary Robinson's Sylphid Self: The End of Feminine
Self-Fashioning' (Philological Quarterly 75 [1996], 501-20).
16 An attitude that persisted after her death, as Arthur Aikin shows in his
admonishing comment to any young lady readers of Robinson's poetry of
sensibility: 'Before a tender-hearted young lady has committed to memory
the invocation to "Apathy", or learned to recite with tragic emphasis the
"Ode to Ingratitude", let her at least be aware from what reflections the
author wished to take shelter in insensibility, and for what favours her
lovers had proved ungrateful' (in Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 470).
17 Interestingly, 'Golfre' redirects the female-on-female violence of
Coleridge's then-unpublished 'Christabel' to a more complicated male-on-
male-via-female triangle. Where Coleridge's narrator in 'Christabel', for
instance, retreats to piety and meaningful silence in the face of violence,
Robinson's in 'Golfre' moves her readers closest to direct representations of
bloody murder, only to fall back on 'Rime'-ish platitudes at the climax.
18 Robinson's Lyrical Tales are built around a series of poetic 'tales' deriving
from competing genres; one also finds 'A Sanctified Tale', 'A Domestic
Tale', and 'A Gypsy Tale', for instance. For further discussion of the struc-
tural nature of the Lyrical Tales, see Pascoe; Curran; and Vargo, 'The
Implications of Desire: Tabitha Bramble and the Lyrical Tales', paper deliv-
ered at '1798 and Its Implications', joint conference of the British
Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the
Study of Romanticism, 6-10 July 1998, St Mary's University College,
Strawberry Hill, London.
19 Later readers of both Keats's 'Isabella' and Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya would
find this murderous scene familiar.
20 Ty notes that Robinson's novel The False Friend (1799) 'is the only one by
Robinson that involves an incestuous relationship between a father and
his daughter' (422 n. 26), but she does not mention 'Golfre' and its violent
contribution to the incest plot.
21 As is usual in poetry of the period, 'fond' is ambiguous: carrying the
meaning of 'silly' as well as 'affectionate', its use allows the poet to imply
criticism even as she applauds the hermit's sensibility.
22 In 'The Doublet of Grey', Robinson again uses the theme of parental oppo-
sition to galvanise her romance, while also reusing elements of 'Golfre': in
this poem, a young heiress's love for the penniless peasant's son Theodore
is thwarted when her father attempts his murder in the manner of Golfre
with Zorietto's lover. The unnamed heroine dresses as a squire in a doublet

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192 Notes

of grey in an attempt to save Theodore, and at the moment her father meets
Theodore, she throws a spear which, directed by Fate, finds its target in 'her
foe'. In the morning she sees that both her father and Theodore are 'cover'd
with wounds' and, despairing, embraces first her father and then Theodore,
and determines to be his bride in the grave. The poem ends with accounts
of a ghostly Theodore who calls for his love, while the castle site is haunted

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by a bloody, shrieking maid 'in her doublet of grey'. In this poem, Robinson
relocates both romance and violence in the distant past - in legend.
23 As I noted in the Introduction, the Hermit's behaviour largely anticipates
that of Wordsworth's Vaudracour.
24 This line acts as a piece of false suspense, as the 'peril' which awaits the
hermit is rather far away at this point, and does not actually threaten him
at all.
25 Robinson's collected poems were published after her death, so it is pos-
sible that her editor, her daughter Maria Elizabeth, removed the explicit
lines. This would transform an authorial revision to an editorial bowdler-
isation.
26 Freud, The interpretation of Dreams, tr. James Strachey (1911; New York:
Avon, 1965), 194; Anzieu, Freud's Self-Analysis, tr. Peter Graham (1975;
London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1986),
244. See also Susan Stafford Friedman, 'Scenes of a Crime: Genesis, Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams, Dora, and Originary Narratives', Genders 17 (1993),
71-96.
27 Darwin, Zoonomia, or The Laws of Organic Life (London: Joseph Johnson,
1794), I, 204. See also David S. Miall, 'The Meaning of Dreams: Coleridge's
Ambivalence', Studies in Romanticism 21 (1982), 57-71.
28 Robinson's mixing of hallucination and reality presents an intriguing
hybrid scene: the monks the Lady sees are 'real', but the corpse she sees
them carry is not. The Lady, it seems, is not creating a visionary world, but
merging fantasy and reality: dressing up the romantic mundane.
29 For the majority of Robinson's readers, Catholicism itself was 'supersti-
tion', so that to move from religious to Gothic visions would be to move
from one superstitious milieu to another.
30 Although the voice has said that the lover 'hastes' to the Lady, instead she
'hastens' to him, again unheroine-like in her claiming of agency, of activ-
ity.
31 It is here that the holy land is revealed clearly as a crypt.
32 It could be said, however, that the changes to the dream figured by Part
Two bespeak a subconscious dissatisfaction with what she has dreamed in
Part One; considering the subversiveness of the message to 'forget' and the
injunction to cease mourning, Part Two's changes both answer the Lady's
doubts and punish her for having had them.
33 It is also the only poem where the hero survives. It is particularly telling
that the threat lies in the heroine's suppressed desire that he die.
34 Records of Woman (1828; Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991), 11-12, 21-2. By
placing her speaker in the feminised space of the bower, and associating
her with children (as the end of the poem shows), Hemans encourages the
reader to see the speaker as a woman, probably Hemans herself.
35 The critical consensus on Hemans is that she exemplified for her readers

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 Notes 193

the domestic affections, although they arrive at this conclusion via differ-
ing assumptions; see, for instance, Anthony Harding, 'Felicia Hemans and
the Effacement of Woman', Romantic Women Writers, eds Feldman and
Kelley, 138-49; Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York:
Routledge, 1993), esp. 123-43; Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine
Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford

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University Press, 1989); and Kevin Eubanks, 'Minerva's Veil: Hemans,
Critics, and the Construction of Gender', European Romantic Review 8
(1997), 341-59. Subsequent references to Harding, Mellor, and Eubanks
will be made in the text.
36 Francis Jeffrey uses this phrase approvingly to describe the content and
subject-matter of Hemans's Records of Woman and The Forest Sanctuary in
his review of 1829: Edinburgh Review 50 (October 1829), 32-47; 34.
37 H.T. Tuckerman, 'Mrs. Hemans', Southern Literary Messenger 7 (1841), 382;
found in Kevin Eubanks, 'Minerva's Veil: Hemans, Criticism and the
Construction of Gender', 342.
38 Feldman, 'The Poet and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary
Marketplace', Keats-Shelley Journal 46 (1997), 167-8.
39 Henry F. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans. With Illustrations of her Literary
Character from Her Private Correspondence (2 vols; London: Saunders and
Otley, 1836), 1:137.
40 See Eubanks for a useful discussion of critical reactions to Hemans and
their possible affect on her output.
41 Dugald Stewart in The Poetical Works of Felicia Hemans, ed. W.M. Rossetti
(London: Ward Lock and Co., 1878), 375n.
42 After a six-year marriage and four sons, Hemans's husband left her in 1818
when she was pregnant with their fifth son; he went to Italy and she never
saw him again. Hemans's contemporaries often praised her powers of
endurance: Wordsworth, for instance, noted approvingly that although
'she was sorely tried ... a beautiful trait in her character was, that she never
uttered a complaint of her husband' (Letters of William and Dorothy
Wordsworth, ed. Alan G. Hill, Vol. VI [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], 314).
For a full discussion of this aspect of Hemans's life, see Norma Clarke,
Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship and Love (London: Routledge, 1990).
Subsequent references to Clarke will be made in the text.
43 Kanneh, 'Love, mourning and metaphor: terms of identity', New Feminist
Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong
(London: Routledge, 1992), 135.
44 In the dream that opens the poem, Arabella sees 'the stag leap free' and
connects its escape from death with her reunion with Seymour: 'thou wert
there'. That she now envisions the stricken deer cut off from healing waters
shows both the continuing currency of the dream, and its reconfiguration
as a nightmare.
45 In imagining 'the crimson flood/ [That] sinks thro' the greensward',
Arabella also foreshadows the dominant image of Records of Woman;
Hemans gives her despairing heroine the voice of prophecy.
46 Indeed, so much does her name suggest this virtue that Mellor even
mistakenly calls her 'Constanzia' (Romanticism and Gender, 132).
47 Here, the reader is reminded of the similarly confused hermit in 'The

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194 Notes

Hermit of Mont Blanc'; like the hermit, Costanza is in danger of substitut-

ing the worship of her lost love for the worship of God. As this discussion
will suggest, however, it is in her very single-mindedness - her mono-
mania - that Hemans suggests the futility of commitment to enduring,
unrequited, love.
48 Hemans, like Robinson, makes use of poetic placement to underline the

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significance of her alterations to the romance, although she is less strict in
her application.
49 Comparing Ianthis's lifeblood to a child's tears has the perhaps inadver-
tent effect of trivialising his death; even as a child's 'hour' of woe quickly
passes, so too does Ianthis's life - and we, like the child, turn to fresh
amusements.
50 Lootens, 'Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine "Internal Enemies,"
and the Domestication of National Identity', PMLA 109 (1994), 243.
51 Eudora's meaningless sacrifice on the burning deck parallels the Boy's in
'Casabianca': both die fiery deaths for their belief in ideals Hemans cannot
fully support.
52 Hemans avoids the far more sexualised image of Imelda either impaling
herself or sucking the poison from the sword itself, but she cannot resist
the vampiric picture of Imelda draining Azzo, though her goal is not
continued life in the face of relentless death, but rather the opposite.
53 Emphasis added. This image reminds one of Eudora's ivy-clasp, so loving
and so deadly, in 'Bride'.
54 Gertrude's commonsensical approach to fidelity contrasts strongly with
Juana's mad devotion and Imelda's fatal constancy, for instance.
55 Hemans ends 'Pauline' by noting 'the tender and the true/ Left [the minia-
ture] alone her sacrifice to prove,/ Hallowing the spot where mirth once
lightly flew,/ To deep, lone, chasten'd thoughts of grief and love'. That the
spot requires 'hallowing' and 'chastened thoughts' emphasises the light-
ness of the mirth that had characterised the manor and Pauline, still proud
of her appearance, and living a life of merriment. Pauline is a flawed
mother, and her unsuccessful rescue and death acts as a punishment for
too much 'mirth' and self-regard.
56 Langbauer, Women and Romance; The Consolations of Gender in the English
Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 103.
57 Terri Doughty, 'Sarah Grand's The Beth Book: The New Woman and the
Ideology of the Romance Ending', in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and
Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, eds Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth
Sweeney (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 193.

5 Transforming the Romance: the Murderous Worlds of

Byron and Landon
1 Byron, 'To Romance', from Hours of Idleness. The Complete Poetical Works:
Vol. I, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 55, 6, 8.
Subsequent references to Byron's poetry will be to this edition and will be
made in the text.
2 Byron here achieves a double feint: the 'alas' implies the speaker's regret at

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 Notes 195

Romance's demise, but this is obviated by the speaker's simultaneous satis-

faction, evident in the relish with which he describes Romance's fate.
3 See Ronald Schreiber, 'The Rejection and Redefinition of Romance in
Byron's Early Poetry', University of Mississippi Studies in English 2 (1981),
43-63, for a similar view, although Schreiber's 'redefinition' is focused on
the turn to natural description in Byron's romances.

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4 See 'L.E.L.'s Last Question' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 'Love-learned
she had sung of love and love/ /All sounds of life assumed one tune of
love' (Victorian Women Poets, ed. Angela Leighton [Oxford: Blackwell,
1995], 15, 21).
5 Landon, 'Six Songs', Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, eds Jerome
McGann and Daniel Riess (Peterborough: Broadview Literary Texts, 1997),
1-2, 5-6, 9-12, 17-20. Subsequent references to this edition will be made
in the text.
6 For a discussion of the performative aspects of Landon's dead women, see
Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 'Coda: Letitia Landon and the
Deathly Pose', 229-43. Subsequent references will be made in the text.
7 Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 228.
8 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, James, Melodrama, and the
Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 30. Subsequent
references will be made in the text.
9 James Smith, Melodrama (London: Methuen, 1973), 6. Subsequent refer-
ences will be made in the text.
10 Byron's Manfred also invites readers to analyse its melodramatic content,
for instance in the extended and none-too-convincing scene on the
Jungfrau, where Manfred is rescued from suicide by the Chamois-Hunter.
In its reiterated appeals to its own visuality and Manfred's patience in
waiting for the Chamois-Hunter to approach near enough to save him
from himself, this scene announces its theatricality - its self-conscious
performativity. Manfred allows Byron to cram into one work a myriad of
dramatic forms: epic, farce, romance, melodrama. See Philip Cox, Gender,
Genre and the Romantic Poets (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1996), Chapter 5: 'Lord Byron: Manfred and the Closet Drama' (107-30) for
an illuminating discussion of some of the other dramatic aspects of the
poem.
11 Morse, 'Desire and the limits of melodrama', in Melodrama, ed. James
Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 24. Subsequent
references will be made in the text.
12 Under this rubric the poetry of Hemans and Robinson, discussed in the
previous chapter, could also be said to be melodramatic, although in char-
acter it is less heightened, less overtly dramatic than that of Landon and
Byron.
13 Hays and Nikolopoulou, 'Introduction', Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence
of a Genre, eds Hays and Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996),
x, xi. They borrow the phrase 'process-like genre' from Hans Robert Jauss.
Subsequent references will be made in the text.
14 Even Amenaide's tragedy has its basic cause in her lover's departure to the
masculine world of war, but she wreaks her revenge on the trophy he

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196 Notes

returns with, as I discuss below.

15 The epigram is Coleridge, found in Morse, 27.
16 I borrow this term from Elaine Handley, who uses it in her book
Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace,
1800-1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) to designate 'the
overall significance of melodrama in terms of the more prominent and

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more exhaustively discussed doctrines of English romanticism' (13). As her
use of lower-case 'romanticism' shows, however, Handley confuses
romance and Romanticism, leading her, as Pascoe has also noticed, to
oppose the melodrama to the romance. What I propose by the term is
more a fusion, a recognition that the melodrama and the romance are
linked forms, the melodrama dependent on and growing from the
romance, as this chapter argues.
17 Atara Stein, "T Loved Her and Destroyed Her": Love and Narcissism in
Byron's Manfred', Philological Quarterly 69 (1990), 190. Subsequent refer-
ences will be made in the text.
18 Caroline Franklin argues that the Byronic heroine is an ever-evolving,
independent and resourceful figure in her book Byron's Heroines (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992). While her approach is provocative, it does not
seem convincing in light of the actual experiences Byron creates for his
female characters; my argument in the following pages challenges
Franklin's on several points, and is more in line with Stuart Curran's: 'the
role of women in [the Tales'] world is to be abused by masculine domi-
nance' (Poetic Form and British Romanticism [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986], 143).
19 In this way Byron, like Hemans and Robinson, uses violence to express
desire; for all, the end result is death.
20 See Seidler, Rediscovering Masculinity: Reason, Language and Sexuality
(London: Routledge, 1989), 23, 18.
21 It should be noted that I by no means intend to imply that homosociality
itself is unnatural or melodramatic; instead, I am arguing that Byron takes
advantage of a cultural assumption to embed a challenge to culture in his
very popular Tales. He is subversive in that he disguises his challenge in
the robes of romance: like the other poets under discussion in this book,
he uses romance to convey anticonventional sentiments. He engages in
what Curran calls, referring to Jerome McGann's work on Byron, a
'critique of the masculine mystique'. See Curran, Poetic Form and British
Romanticism, 143, and McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), esp. 141-64. For a discussion
of Byron's own homo- or bisexuality, see L. Crompton, Byron and Greek
Love (London: Faber, 1985); for a discussion of Byron's textual representa-
tions of homosexuality, see Jonathan David Gross, '"One Half What I
Should Say": Byron's Gay Narrator in Don Juan', European Romantic Review
9 (1998), 323-50.
22 Hope, 'Melancholic Modernity: the Hom(m)osexual Symptom and the
Homosocial Corpse', differences 6 (1994), 174.
23 Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 172.
24 See Franklin, 32 passim, for the key aspects of her argument.

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 Notes 197

25 'Bride', The Complete Poetical Works, ed. McGann, vol. Ill (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1981): 1:480-2. These lines introduce what Brooks calls
the 'text of muteness', a reliance on non-speaking signs: 'melodrama so
often has recourse to non-verbal means of expressing meaning' (56). The
silence figured by the gap between cantos takes the place of the confused
questioning an announcement like Selim's should logically provoke.

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26 Calder, 'The Hero as Lover: Byron and Women', Byron: Wrath and Rhyme,
ed. Alan Bold (London: Vision Press Ltd, 1983), 113. Subsequent references
will be made in the text.
27 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). See also
Paul Hammond, Love Between Men in English Literature (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996): besides offering a stimulating and comprehensive
discussion of literary homosociality and homosexuality, this book also
contains a thorough and indispensable annotated bibliography.
28 One suspects Byron of slyly resexualising the heterosexual romance at the
very moment Zuleika denies it; it seems impossible not to read this line as
a pun.
29 Giaffir, for instance, never even knows of Selim's love for Zuleika; he kills
Selim because of their quarrel over Selim's father, not to save Zuleika for
himself or his proxy, the Sultan.
30 McGann, 'Hero With a Thousand Faces: The Rhetoric of Byronism', Studies
in Romanticism 31 (1992), 313, 308.
31 Hassan and the Giaour also have their identifying epithets: Hassan is
'stern', the Giaour 'black'. The superficiality of their designations is itself
melodramatic, remembering that the melodrama relies on easily digested,
one-dimensional characterisation.
32 Byron uses this word both in its religious and its social sense: Leila is of the
Giaour's faith, Christianity, so that by loving the Giaour she proves her
fidelity to religion as well. In this way, she could never be anything but
faithless to Hassan, whose religion she does not share.
33 Ross, 'Romantic Quest and Conquest: Troping Masculine Power in the
Crisis of Poetic Identity', Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 45.
34 See The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London: Routledge,
1991).
35 Laura Claridge, Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992), 242. Marilyn Butler calls the Giaour and Hassan
'opposites'; see 'The Orientalism of Byron's Giaour', Byron and the Limits of
Fiction, eds Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1988), 86. Subsequent references will be made in the text.
36 For instance, Hassan: '"Tis he! Well met in any hour,/ Lost Leila's love -
accursed Giaour!"' (618-19); the Giaour: '"Yes, Leila sleeps beneath the
wave,/ But his shall be a redder grave;/ Her spirit pointed well the steel/
Which taught that felon heart to feel"' (675-8). It is only in her loss that
the men find agreement.
37 Sonia Hofkosh writes of the 'ambivalent love affair' conducted between
Byron and Scott; she says 'Taking the place of Lady Byron and the poet's
other disaffected admirers, Scott in his review of Childe Harold takes the

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198 Notes

poet for better and for worse'. This, she notes, constitutes a 'marriage of
minds, if not of bodies'. Such an account, derived from Scott/Byron corre-
spondence, demonstrates the viability, both then and now, of the notion
of male 'romantic friendships'. See Hofkosh, 'The Writer's Ravishment:
Women and the Romantic Author - The Example of Byron', Romanticism
and Feminism, 101.

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38 Richardson, 'The Dangers of Sympathy: Sibling Incest in English Romantic
Poetry', SEL 25 (1985), 744.
39 Watkins, 'Social Relations in Byron's The Giaour', ELH 52 (1985), 883.
Subsequent references will be made in the text.
40 Leila's problematic there/not-there position further vexes the
Hassan/Giaour bond.
41 Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 26. Mellor argues
that the 'most famous Romantic love poems may thus propound a sexism
of a most seductive and insidious kind, for the poet claims to cherish his
beloved, bright star that she is, above all else. But the love he feels is but
self-love: he ignores her human otherness in order to impose his own
metaphors, his own identity, upon her, to render her but a clone (or soul
mate) of himself (27). If, however, the 'Romantic poet' yearns for a 'clone',
an Other whose boundaries have been collapsed into Self-sameness, then
it suggests the need for sex-sameness as well, to coin a term.
42 The narrator nonetheless arraigns Conrad: his choice not to explore 'the
reason why' suggests he understands very clearly his responsibility, and
also indicates his refusal to accept that responsibility. The quotation is
found in Marina Vitale, 'The Domesticated Heroine in Byron's Corsair and
William Hone's Prose Adaptation', Literature and History 10 (1984), 74.
43 Although both Kaled and Gulnare survive the poems' violence, they are
both unsexed females, existing on the margins of identity, if not of plot.
44 'Parisina' revisits the incest plot of 'Bride', but its emphasis on merely legal
incest is as deflating of the potential taboo as Selim's transformation from
Zuleika's brother to her cousin.
45 See Soderholm, 'Byron, Nietzsche, and the Mystery of Forgetting', CLIO 23
(1993), 60-1 passim.
46 'Preface' to The Venetian Bracelet, vol. IV of The Poetical Works of Letitia
Elizabeth Landon, in Four Volumes (London: Longman, Orme, Brown,
Green, and Longmans, 1839), v. Subsequent references, to 'Venetian
Bracelet', will be made in the text.
47 Indeed, Stuart Curran says of Landon (and Hemans) that in their work 'we
can discern ... an actual transition into the characteristic preoccupations
of Victorian verse'. Curran, 'The "I" Altered', Romanticism and Feminism,
188.
48 For instance, almost all of Landon's recent critics focus on this aspect of
her poetry: Glennis Stephenson asserts that Landon 'focuses exclusively
and obsessively on romantic love', Virginia Blain considers that her 'char-
acteristic subject-matter' was 'thwarted romantic love', and Anne Mellor
argues that 'Landon's poems repetitively construct the narrative of female
love', while Daniel Riese maintains that 'the doomed love story' 'always'
subsumes Landon's surface subjects. See Stephenson, 'Poet Construction:
Mrs. Hemans, L.E.L., and the Image of the Nineteenth-Century Woman

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 Notes 199

Poet', Relmagming Women: Representations of Women in Culture, eds Shirley

Neuman and Stephenson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 69,
and also 'Letitia Landon and the Victorian Improvisatrice: The
Construction of L.E.L.', Victorian Poetry 30 (1992), 1-17; Blain, 'Letitia
Elizabeth Landon, Eliza Mary Hamilton, and the Genealogy of the
Victorian Poetess', Victorian Poetry 33 (1995), 39; Mellor, Romanticism and

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Gender, Chapter 6 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 113; Riess, 'Laetitia
Landon and the Dawn of English Post-Romanticism', SEL 36 (1996), 816.
In addition, Landon's life, by 1928, itself appeared fodder for melodrama;
see D.E. Enfield, L.E.L., A Mystery of the Thirties (London: Hogarth Press,
1928).
49 Linkin, 'Romantic Aesthetics in Mary Tighe and Letitia Landon: How
Women Poets Recuperate the Gaze', European Romantic Review 7 (1997),
174.
50 See Romanticism and Gender, 107-23, for Mellor's discussion of Landon's
poetry.
51 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge,
1993), 324.
52 Lionel Stevenson calls Landon a 'female Byron' in 'Miss Landon, "The
Milk-and-Watery Moon of our Darkness", 1824-30', Modern Language
Quarterly 8 (1947), 358.
53 Brooks notes that in melodrama, 'good and evil can be named as persons
are named - and melodramas tend in fact to move toward a clear nomina-
tion of the moral universe' (17). It is a mark of Landon's originality that
even as she presents her readers with stock characters, she complicates and
enlarges their roles; initial characterisations are inevitably reworked and
represented.
54 Although 'Venetian Bracelet' seems only to comprise thirteen parts, the
original printing uses the heading 'VII' twice in a row.
55 Stephenson, 'Letitia Landon and the Victorian Improvisatrice: The
Construction of L.E.L.', 11.
56 Landon consistently reminds us of Amenaide's pride, suggesting another
underlying melodramatic trope: pride goeth before a fall. Here, Amenaide
uses her pride to mask her grief: 'Oh, misery, how much she had to hide!'
(302)
57 Amenaide's first act of violence is internalised: love itself bleeds her.
58 In its echoes of 'better half, the line suggests that Amenaide is wed more
to Love than to her desire for Leoni.
59 The repeated Part VIIs have the inadvertent effect of linking Amenaide's
despair at her loss and Edith's (Leoni's bride) triumph at her gain; both are
dealt with in Part 'VII'.
60 In another link, Landon allows both Amenaide's grief and Edith's death to
figure as 'saddest scenes'; her use of superlatives is both ironic and melo-
dramatic. Edith's death scene 'grafts a ... celebration of female loveliness
on to a scene of violent death': 'Life passing in convulsive sobs away./ Still
mid her hair the red rose wreath was hung,/ Mocking her cheek with the
rich dye it flung;/ The festal robe still sparkled as it flow'd;/ Still on her
neck a few fresh flowers glow'd...' (604-8). The quotation is from Clare R.
Kinney, 'Chivalry Unmasked: Courtly Spectacle and the Abuses of

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200 Notes

Romance in Sidney's New Arcadia', SEL 35 (1995), 46.

61 Many readers, of course, did just that, leading to the construction of L.E.L.
as a fallen woman; both Mellor and Stephenson record William
Macready's 1835 diary indictment: 'She is fallen!' (Stephenson 71; Mellor
122; Macready, The Diaries of William Charles Macready, 1833-1851, ed.
William Toynbee [London: Chapman and Hall, 1912], I, 262). However, it

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is much easier to read Landon's narrators as the speaker in a dramatic
monologue, whose own story is subsumed to the narration at hand, but
who cannot refrain from hints and suggestions. This, of course, is in line
with Landon's creative exploration of the improvisatrice, and in many of
her poems she relies on the figure of the female bard: Isabelle in 'Roland's
Tower' is introduced to readers as just such a figure. Isobel Armstrong
contends in Victorian Poetry that the genre of the dramatic monologue was
in fact 'invented' by women poets, commenting on the many female poets
who spoke in another's voice in their work years before Browning and
Tennyson took up the form; see Armstrong, 325 passim.
62 Even as Amenaide's flaw is pride, so too Isabelle has hers: her eyes 'were
too passionate for happiness' (75). And yet, despite the narrator's warning
against indulging in passion, and Isabelle's 'too passionate' eyes, the
poem's catastrophe proceeds rather from Roland's defect, as I will discuss.
63 We are first introduced to Isabelle when she is 'in the April hour of life'.
Landon uses the imagery of the seasons to anchor her plot and suggest its
developments, but this also associates the love story with the cycle of the
seasons, always inexorably leading to winter.
64 There is a mystery surrounding this scarf. It is the same one that Isabelle
gives to Roland 'for his colours': 'he snatched the scarf/ That Isabelle had
tied around his neck,/ And gave it her' (123, 168-70). And yet, when
Isabelle gives it to Roland it is blue. Although this may simply be a mistake
on Landon's part, it is interesting to note that Isabelle's eyes, 'too passion-
ate for happiness', also undergo a change of colour; just before she enters
the convent we are told that 'her dim eye/ Had wept away its luxury of
blue' (159-60). Somehow, Roland's error has drained the colour from
Isabelle - she has moved from blue to white, from summer to winter. As
much as Isabelle's love has undone Roland, his love has vampirised her:
Love, plainly, is bad for you.
65 In this way Landon's version of Love functions like the dark version of
chivalry described in Chapter 1.
66 From The Golden Violet, with its Tales of Romance and Chivalry: and Other
Poems (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827).
67 The speaker uses 'you' throughout, allowing lover and Love to conflate.

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Index

Anna Matilda, 39, 42, 43, 47, 53-66, Claridge, Laura, 151, 157-8

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179 n. 3 Clarke, Norma, 124, 128
Anzieu, Didier, 115 Clery, E.J., 98, 101, 103-4, 120
Armstrong, Isobel, 161, 166, 169, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 2, 9,
200 n. 61 67-73 passim, 73-84
Armstrong, Nancy, 176 n. 14 T h e Eolian Harp', 75-7
Auerbach, Eric, 14-15 'Reflections o n Having Left a Place
of Retirement', 77-8
Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 34-7 passim T h i s Lime-Tree Bower m y Prison',
Batty, John, 16-17 78-9
Beattie, James, 27, 35 'Frost at Midnight', 80-1
Beer, Gillian, 69-74 passim, 97 'Fears in Solitude', 81-2
Beiderwell, Bruce, 176 n. 11 T h e Nightingale. A Conversation
Bishop, Lloyd, 70, 8 1 , 84 Poem', 82-3
Blain, Virginia, 198 n. 48 Cowley, Hannah, see Anna Matilda
Blair, Hugh, 34 Cox, Philip, 195 n. 10
body, 42, 44, 45, 53-66 passim, 143, Curran, Stuart, 1, 2, 6, 7, 103, 105,
165 107, 160, 183 n. 1
Bostetter, Edward, 4 1 , 74
Bowra, C. M., 70, 72, 88 Darwin, Erasmus, 115
British Album, The, 39-66 passim Davies, Kate, 176 n. 5
Brooks, Peter, 44, 137-44 passim, death, 48-9, 57, 98-134, 135-74
153-6 passim, 167, 173 passim
Brownstein, Rachel, 2 Delia Crusca, 9, 39, 42, 43, 46-7,
Burke, Edmund, 3 2 - 3 , 178 n. 3 1 , 179 53-66, 179 n. 3
n. 33 Delia Cruscanism, 2, 9, 39-66
Butler, Marilyn, 153 apostrophe, 43-53
Bygrave, Stephen, 76-7, 84 desire, 39-66 passim
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 1,2, 10, female, 98-104, 120
135-42 passim, 142-58 Dibattista, Maria, 45
T o Romance', 135-6 direct address, see Delia Cruscanism
T h e Bride of Abydos', 144-9 apostrophe
T h e Giaour', 149-55 disorder, 10, 17, 25, 28, 5 1 , 111, 139,
T h e Corsair', 155-6 146
'Lara', 156 mental, 23, 26-7, 29, 34-6, 119,
'Parisina', 156-7 125-6
Dobson, Susannah, 2 1 , 26-30
Calder, Jenni, 145-6, 150 The Literary History of the
Cameron, Deborah, 101-2 passim Troubadours, 26-9
Canning, George, 34-5 Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry, 26,
chivalry, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 16-38, 89-90, 29-30
141 Doughty, Terri, 133
Cixous, Helene, 21 dreams, 115-21

209

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210 Index

Duff, David, 3, 8, 12-17 passim, 26, hero, 6, 9, 67-97 passim, 132, 142,
32, 33 170-1, 175 n. 10
non-hero, 111-14
Eagleton, Terry, 43-4 heroine, 25, 90, 93, 99-103, 118-19,
Enscoe, Gerald, 74, 89, 93 142, 170-1
Eubanks, Kevin, 123 Herrmann, Claudia, 68

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Everest, Kelvin, 76-82 passim, 185 n. 21 heterosexuality, 160-74 passim
Hogle, Jerrold, 175 n. 6
Fairchild, Hoxie Neale, 75 homosociality, 142-58
Feldman, Paula, 122 Hope, Trevor, 144
feminine/femininity/feminisation, Huet, Pierre, 33, 38
27, 83, 122 Hurd, Richard, 7, 12, 17-20, 21
Fischer, Hermann, 86 Letters o n Chivalry a n d Romance
Franklin, Caroline, 144 Jameson, Fredric, 14
Frazer, Elizabeth, 101-2 passim Johnston, Arthur, 20
Freud, Sigmund, 115
Frye, Northrop, 14, 21 Kanneh, Kadiatu, 124
Keats, John, 1, 2, 9, 67-73 passim,
Gamer, Michael, 7 84-97
gender, 2, 7, 21-2, 29, 73, 86, 150, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', 88-90
160-74 passim Lamia, 9 0 - 3
roles, 10, 12, 2 1 , 23, 177 n. 16 Isabella, 93-5
genre, 4 - 5 , 7, 8, 12, 15, 20, 37, 6 0 - 1 , The Eve of St Agnes, 95-6
67, 68, 71, 136 Knox, Vicessimus, 35
violence against, 109-10, 114, 118
Gifford, William, 39 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 2, 7, 10,
Girouard, Mark, 177 n. 8 136-42 passim, 158-74
Gittings, Robert, 91 'Six Songs', 136-7
gothic, 4, 18-19, 105-21 passim, 176 T h e Venetian Bracelet', 161-8
n. 14 'Roland's Tower', 168-71
Gow, Peter, 100-2 passim, 104 T h e M o u n t a i n Grave', 171-3
'Love's Last Lesson', 173-4
Handley, Elaine, 196 n. 16 Langbauer, Laurie, 3, 4, 133
Harding, Anthony, 122, 123 Levinson, Marjorie, 85-9 passim, 94, 96
Hargreaves-Mawdsley, W. N., 41 Levy, G. R., 69-70
Harvey, Penelope, 100-2 passim, 104 Linkin, Harriet Kramer, 158, 166
Hays, Michael, 139-40, 173 Lootens, Tricia, 128
Haywood, Eliza, 33 love, 5, 28, 38, 40, 45, 48, 5 1 - 3 , 55,
Hemans, Felicia, 2, 7, 9, 98-103 98-143 passim, 159-74 passim
passim, 121-34 L u h m a n n , Niklas, 99, 103
'An Hour of Romance', 121-2
'Arabella Stuart', 125-6 MacCannell, Juliet, 151
'Costanza', 126-7 McGann, Jerome, 39-44 passim, 49,
T h e Bride of the Greek Isle', 127-8 52, 61, 63, 149, 158, 160, 167
Tmelda', 128-9 m a n / m e n , 9-10
'Juana', 129-30 dead, 103-34 passim
'Gertrude', 130-31 masculine/masculinity, 6, 10, 28,
'Madeline', 131-3 68-9, 71-3, 74-97 passim, 122,
'Pauline', 133 142-58 passim, 172, 176 n. 11,

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 Index 211

176 n. 4 structure of, 2, 19, 53, 57, 64, 66, 120

Mellor, Anne, 74, 86, 122-33 passim, violence against, 3, 6, 9, 30, 37,
140, 155, 159, 167, 171 40-3, 53, 54, 59, 61, 66, 84, 110,
melodrama, 10, 137-42, 142-74 125-6, 135-6, 160
passim, 186 n. 29 Rose, Jacqueline, 137, 143
Merry, Robert, see Delia Crusca Ross, Marlon, 71, 72, 151

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Montagu, Elizabeth, 26, 32 Runge, Laura, 182 n. 24
Moore, John, 30, 35
Morse, William, 139-42 passim Scott, Walter, 6-7
Murray, Hugh, 30, 33, 34 Marmion, 7
Sedgwick, Eve, 148
Nikolopoulou, Anastasia, 139-40, 173 Seidler, Victor, 143
sensation, 55-66
order, 14, 15, 34, 4 1 , 145 sex, 9, 35, 39, 43, 56, 60, 64-6, 92,
imposition of, 8, 18, 25, 30, 33, 37, 182 n. 27, 182 n. 28, 182 n. 32
50, 56 Siddons, Sarah, 46-7
Smith, James, 138-42 passim
Parker, Patricia, 14, 15, 35, 37 Soderholm, James, 157
Pascoe, Judith, 4 1 , 42, 54, 59, 63, Southey, Robert, 12-13
138, 180 n. 3, 181 n. 23 T o Romance', 11-13
Percy, Thomas, 7, 20, 21 Stein, Atara, 143
performativity, 68, 73-84 passim, 195 Stephenson, Glennis, 164
n. 10 Stillinger, Jack, 84-7 passim, 91, 93, 95
Pinch, Adela, 3, 4 Swann, Karen, 88, 90
Praz, Mario, 10
Tennenhouse, Leonard, 176 n. 14
quest, 2, 9, 69-84 passim theatricality, 42, 46, 52, 53, 54, 66,
81, 138, 145, 164
Reed, Walter, 70, 72, 78, 86 Thorslev, Peter, 75
Reeve, Clara, 7, 12, 20-6, 34 Ty, Eleanor, 115, 191 n. 20
The Progress of Romance, 20-6
revolution, 3, 13, 14, 33, 35 van Ghent, Dorothy, 87-8, 9 0 - 1 , 93,
American, 3, 9, 13, 18 96
French, 5-6, 8, 3 1 , 33 violence, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 18, 24-5, 28,
Richardson, Alan, 154 32, 33, 38, 46, 48, 67, 72, 94-5,
Riess, Daniel, 158, 160, 167, 198 n. 48 100-4, 140, 154, 157, 161, 174,
Robinson, Jeffrey, 73, 89 184 n. 1, 188 n. 52
Robinson, Mary, 2, 7, 9, 31, 37-8, sexual, 113-14
55, 98-103 passim, 103-21, 180 Vitale, Marina, 156
n. 3, 182 n. 33
Hubert de Sevrac, 31, 37-8 war, 3, 8, 17, 31
'Golfre', 104-10 Warton, Thomas, 12
T h e Hermit of Mont-Blanc', Watkins, Daniel, 8, 155
110-14, 175 n. 8 Wolfson, Susan, 123, 131, 133, 180 n. 7
T h e Lady of the Black Tower', w o m a n / w o m e n , 12, 2 1 , 24, 47-50
115-21 dead, 137, 141, 144-58 passim, 166
romance, 12, 40, 42, 52, 53-66 passim, Wordsworth, William, 1, 5-6, 175 n. 8
67, 75, 76, 85, 135-6, 171 The Prelude, 5-6
epistolary, 53-66

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