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27 CHAPTER ONE Indifference and Epistolarity in The Eve of St.Agnes There is a self-contradictory quality about Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes that has struck readers from the very first. Richard Woodhouse, who recorded his thoughts about the poem while it was still in manuscript, admired it in general, but was shocked, even repulsed, by a few of the stanzas (LK 2: 161–65). Above all he objected to Porphyro’s stratagem for seducing Madeline in her sleep. Yet as Woodhouse admits, there are “no improper expressions” used, and it seems surprisingly prudish of Woodhouse to disapprove of Keats’s account of the seduction. Betrayal, rape, murder, and other horrors are stock elements of romance; Woodhouse particularly liked and approved of Keats’s Isabella, which involves a gruesome decapitation and gothic suggestions of necrophilia. Porphyro’s actions are sinister, perhaps , but as elements of a romance plot they are not unusual or unexpected . I believe that Woodhouse misplaced his feelings of shock, which were caused not by Madeline’s betrayal1 but by her apparent indifference. For if the survival of Wordsworth’s Solitary is surprising, Madeline’s is truly remarkable. Unlike the Excursion, The Eve of St. Agnes is consciously cast as a romance, a genre that practically requires the death of anyone crossed, betrayed, or disappointed in love. Thus in Keats’s poems Isabella dies at the loss of Lorenzo, Lycius dies immediately upon the unmasking of Lamia, and Ludolph in Otho the Great, flagging from the moment he learns of Auranthe’s treachery, perishes definitively when he learns of her death. Or, to take a larger sampling, Byron’s Eastern Tales: the Giaour, hardiest of the heroes, survives his Leila by just a few years; Zuleika in The Bride of Abydos dies for grief over Selim even before he is killed; Medora 1. Woodhouse certainly believed Porphyro’s action to constitute a betrayal, even a rape. Keats leaves the issue of Madeline’s possible consent rather more uncertain. Nevertheless, I have throughout this chapter used words such as “deception” and “betrayal” to describe Madeline’s unquestionablyunhappy experience, since although she acquiesces after the fact (that is my point), she expresses only disappointment and distress upon waking and finding Porphyro. 28 Chapter One dies of misery over the Corsair—whether in despair of his return or in grief that he has betrayed her with Gulnare is unclear; and Lara and The Siege of Corinth show the same pattern. Only Don Juan shares with Madeline the tenacity of a posthumous existence, as I discuss in the next chapter. Even if we do not expect Madeline to pine to death, the traditions of romance lead us to expect a passionate response of some sort—perhaps suicide (like Lucretia) or violence (like Philomela). Instead, Keats provides a strange passivity, bordering on indifference, which explains why Woodhouse was offended by the story, as he presumably was not by “The Rape of Lucrece.” Madeline’s reaction when confronted with the terrible reality of her own deception is not to feel the betrayal deeply, but quite the opposite—to submit to the inevitable and to turn her attention away from her grief to more practical matters. Porphyro and the narrator react in a similar fashion at the other crucial moments of the poem. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of The Eve of St.Agnes: after each build-up the reader encounters a peculiar dissipation of tension, a seeming indifference on the part of the characters or the narrator that disappoints our expectations of a climax. This indifference consistently takes the form either of submission (a refusal to struggle) or of evasion (a refusal to care). Since romances traditionally revolve around climactic confrontations, this readiness either to give in or simply to ignore the problem destabilizes the poem and discomforts the reader. The claim that The Eve of St. Agnes refuses to conform to the standards of romance will hardly come as a surprise. The most notable romantic or “metaphysical” reading of the poem, forwarded by Earl Wasserman in 1953, holds that both Madeline and Keats cope with the difficulties of their world by entering a realm of imaginative transcendence. This has long been contested by a “skeptical” school of criticism, beginning with Jack Stillinger (1961), which detects myriad ironies underlying and complicating the lovers’ tale.2 But both the metaphysical and the skeptical reading take it for granted that the poem is one of conflict or...

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