Charlotte Smith's Melancholia on the Page and Stage

Whether to praise or condemn Charlotte Smith's art, the late-eighteenth-century readers of her collection Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems similarly describe her work as poetry of "touching melancholy," "pleasing melancholy," or even as "a mere flow of melancholy." ¹ First published in 1784 and appearing in nine editions and a second volume over the next sixteen years, Elegiac Sonnets is a collection to which a melancholic mode gives aesthetic consistency. ² While most critics of Elegiac Sonnets acknowledge that Smith's lyric speaker is insistently melancholic, recent studies by Adela Pinch, Judith Pascoe, and Sarah Zimmerman emphasize the theatricality of this poetic persona, leaving unexamined the significance of her sorrows. For these critics, Smith's theatricality emerges in her literary ventriloquism of other writers' voices, in her public dramatization of her private woes, and in her staged appeal to the sympathies of the reader. ³ Shifting this discussion of Smith in order to focus on her speaker's melancholia, I suggest here that the sorrow of Smith's poetic persona generates and is generated by the theatricality of the persona's poetic productions. The lyric speaker portrays herself as a poet who seeks to escape her sorrows through poetic creation, but only sporadically achieves a pleasurable literary melancholia. Even when she does so, the speaker emerges from her poetic visions to find her suffering unalleviated. Smith's speaker presents her poetic performances as illusory and fleeting and associates these qualities with the theatricality of sentimental spectatorship as practiced by male literary authorities. The speaker exposes the theatricality of the conventional poetic production of sorrow in order to claim that her own sorrow, which exceeds the boundaries of traditional poetic representation, is actually the most powerful form of theater. In the speaker of Elegiac Sonnets, Smith creates a poetic persona who insists upon melancholia as the sign of her authentic literary production, which occurs in a representational dimension closer to "real" experience than is the realm of masculine poetic convention. By representing theatricality not as the illusory opposite of authentic experience but as the inescapable mode of experience, Smith carries her speaker's melancholia beyond poetic conventions of sensibility, and thereby claims a higher cultural standing for her own productions.

Smith's speaker continually praises, quotes, and impersonates writers of sensibility. In the first sonnet of the collection, the speaker echoes Alexander Pope's passionate Eloisa to Abelard (1717). ⁴ The speaker most frequently alludes to the poets formerly known as "pre-Romantic," including Thomas Gray, Thomas Warton, William Collins, and William Cowper. The phantom of Thomas Otway (1652-85), the Restoration writer of sentimental tragedy, haunts several sonnets. Smith's speaker's establishment of a canon based on the qualification of sensibility is unsurprising: as G. J. Barker-Benfield demonstrates, the late eighteenth century is more convincingly characterized as a culture of sensibility than as a rational age pocked with oppositional cults of sentimentality. ⁵ With the exception of Collins, Smith's speaker's poets of feeling were all accepted as aesthetic exemplars by numerous would-be canon makers of the late eighteenth century. ⁶ Smith also includes five sonnets "Supposed to be Written by Werter," Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's suicidal lover, one of the most dominant figures in the culture of sensibility. ⁷ In presenting these literary men as exalted literary geniuses, Smith's speaker locates aesthetic authority in the man of sensibility rather than in the advocate of a common human nature and disinterested judgment. ⁸

In her collection, Smith loosely translates or improvises upon four sonnets from Petrarch (1304-74). While Petrarch cannot be classified as a poet of sensibility, his adoption by eighteenth-century sentimental culture is pilloried by Smith herself in her comedy What Is She? (1799), a work as yet unnoticed by contemporary critics. ⁹ In the first scene of the play's second act, the aspiring author Mrs. Gurnet...