Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry (review)

In the acknowledgements for Allegories of One's Own Mind: Melancholy in Victorian Poetry, David G. Riede comments that melancholy "tends to reproduce its symptoms in its students." He specifies the symptom of "multitudinousness," which he defines as an "anomic lack of focus producing kaleidoscopic, disordered representation" (ix). This multitudinousness, however, also seems to afflict Riede's introduction. Though it begins with a useful review of the Victorian (and especially Arnoldian) recognition of "the inevitability of melancholy in modern literature" (2), an array of theorists, Victorian and contemporary, comes to crowd this book, appearing and disappearing with every shift of the kaleidoscope. The writings of Matthew Arnold and Walter Benjamin are especially relevant to Riede's arguments, but the brief summaries of many other critics too often resemble focused encyclopedia entries. The sentences concerning, say, Emile Durkheim or Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok reliably inform the reader but do not consistently inform the readings of the poems under consideration. They do suggest, however, that while, theoretically, misery loves company, misery may especially love theoretical company.

Riede's review of the theoretical literature establishes how continuous the personal and cultural problem of melancholia has been from the Victorian age to our own. In the "Preface" to his Poems (1853), Arnold notoriously declared, "the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced" (The Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super [The University of Michigan Press, 1960–77] 1: 1), and clearly that dialogue remains a voluble one. In chapters on Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett (so identified by Riede throughout), Robert Browning, and Edward Fitzgerald, Riede's comprehensive approach allows him to discuss an admirable range of poems, long and short, well- and lesser-known. Thus, the Tennyson chapter discusses Maud (1855), called by Riede "the greatest and fullest expression of Victorian melancholy" (88), but also "Anacaona" (1830); the Barrett chapter discusses Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), but also "The Poet's Vow" (1836); the Browning chapter discusses "Andrea del Sarto" (1855), but also Sordello (1840); and the Fitzgerald chapter discusses The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), but also "Salámán and Absál" (1856). These poets and poems benefit from being read in one another's company, although this broad and almost convivial colloquy may itself call into question the conventional association of melancholy with alienated isolation.

The equable proficiency of the chapters, which efficiently consider a range of theoretical and poetic works, highlights how Riede's kaleidoscopic method may run counter to its subject, melancholy. His critical approach is to some extent predicated on Benjamin's insight in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) concerning what follows when "the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy" ([NLB, 1977] 183). Certainly, Riede recognizes the effects of an unwavering gaze, as when, examining Browning's Paracelsus (1835), he discusses "the mystery or enigma produced by the fixed gaze on objects, so characteristic of the melancholic" (143). But he does not sufficiently explore whether what may most ally melancholy and allegory is the fixity of attention they sustain: melancholy on an emotional level, allegory on an interpretive one. Indeed, perhaps the object becomes melancholy under the gaze of allegory. Here theory should have influenced Riede's critical practice more fully; one often wishes for an unwavering, and thus transformative, gaze to be fixed on more of the poems he discusses.

The poem that most demands just such a sustained gaze is Tennyson's "Mariana" (1830), because Allegories of One's Own Mind glances obsessively toward it. Although the pattern is never acknowledged, every chapter circles back to this work as if the book itself cannot escape Mariana's grange. In this, the text resembles the character: as Riede observes early in his Tennyson chapter, "Mariana is herself stuck in place, trapped in the poem's viscous language and in her own obsessive refrain" (51). Other characters join her in similar discursive quicksand; Riede...