In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Art of Oblivion: Charlotte Smith and Helen of Troy CHARLOTTE SUSSMAN The late eighteenth century was marked by a crisis in the way individual ity and identity were conceived. On the one hand, the rhetorical strategies of sentimentality, based on the capacity of readers, listeners or observers to put themselves in the place of another, were being mobilized to ameliorate the plight of oppressed groups, such as women, laborers and slaves. On the other hand, those readers', listeners' and observers' receptivity could be seen as dangerous impressionability, a threat to individual moral agency. This crisis had ramifications not only for political activity during the period, but also for poetic production. The lyric poets of the 1780s and 90s used the sentimental structures of identification to express previously unrepresented forms of identity, such as femininity, social marginalization, or madness; yet they also explored the difficulties of writing poetry under the threat of being overwhelmed by the emotions of others. In "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," Northrop Frye notes that the poetry of the later eighteenth century is characterized by the way poets define their own voices through metaphorical identifications with others. He points out that In the age of sensibility some of the identifications involving the poet seem manic, like Blake's with Druidic bards, or Smart's with Hebrew prophets, or depressive, like Cowper's with a scapegoat figure, such as a stricken 131 132 / SUSSMAN deer or castaway, or merely bizarre, like Macpherson's with Ossian or Chatterton's with Rowley.1 In order to insert the poetry of women writers such as Charlotte Smith into this pantheon of the abject, however, we need to recognize that a number of these poems work not only by invoking such identifications, but also by repudiating them. With some frequency, the kinds of identifications Frye describes collapse—leaving the poet alienated and isolated from the bonds of sympathy he or she has tried to forge. Thus, the final lines of Cowper's "Castaway " articulate a despairing emotional solitude, as the poet, "beneath a rougher sea," is "whelmed in deeper gulfs than he" (11. 65-6); and Bums dissolves his imagined community with the mouse, telling it "Still thou art blessed compared wi' me / the present only toucheth thee" (11. 43-4).2 One might say, then, that while "the poetry of sensibility" explores the power of sentimental identifications to construct poetic identity, it also tries to imagine what poetry would sound like if the demands of sympathy were somehow thwarted. /. Oblivion In Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, this questioning of the limits of sympathy most often takes the form of attempting to delineate a state outside of affect—a condition she usually calls "oblivion." This is a mental state available to lunatics, the dead, and, strangely enough, to male rustics; yet, it is a condition which the poet herself can only "envy." Observing the dead of the "Church-yard at Middleton in Sussex" (Sonnet 44) she concludes that "They hear the warring elements no more: / While I am doom'd—by life's long storm opprest, / to gaze with envy on their gloomy rest" (11. 13-4); admiring the "sleeping woodman" of Sonnet 54, she asks "would I could taste, like this unthinking hind / a sweet forgetfulness of human care" (11.1112 ); and describing the "vacant mind" of the shepherd of Sonnet 9, she notes that "he has never felt the pangs that move / Th'indignant spirit___/ Nor his rude bosom those fine feelings melt, / Children of Sentiment and Knowledge bom" (11. 3, 5-6, 11-12: Smith's emphasis).3 In these formulations, Smith primarily characterizes herself as envious—a psychological dynamic almost the opposite of sympathy; she seems drawn to the exploration of mental states which defeat the strategies of identification. Smith's interest in this vacant, uncaring, seemingly affectless state—to which male rustics have an access denied to the female poet—foregrounds the question of gender difference in the "poetry of sensibility." Indeed, Stuart Curran, citing Mary Robinson's ode 'To Apathy," Frances Greville's "Prayer Art of Oblivion: Charlotte Smith and Helen of Troy / 133 for Indifference" and Ann Yearsley's 'To Indifference" as representative...

pdf

Share