“A Series of Small Inconstancies”: Letitia Landon and the Sewn-Together Subject

Abstract

Constancy is made up of a series of small inconstancies, which never come to any thing; and takes credit for its loyalty, because in long-run it ends where it began. (1) THE PRECEDING EPIGRAPH APPEARS IN LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON'S FIRST Silver Fork novel, Romance and Reality (1831). At first passage seems to refer primarily to romantic relationships (one heart takes credit for its loyalty to another heart), and to suggest that no lover is ever quite faithful to his/her partner in a strict and absolute sense. But Landon is a writer who tends to blast all essential categories out of existence. Her literary corpus suggests that not just constancy in love, but constancy itself is theoretically impossible. To be constant to anything--a lover, a moral or intellectual ideal, a sense of self--is simply to be abortively inconstant to it. And this is especially case with traditional, high romantic notions of subjectivity. For Landon, self is little more than a sewn-together construct (fondly imagined as an organism) whose fissures are conveniently and perennially ignored. In this sense Landon is voice of her literary epoch. Consider following description of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and its famous monster: Frankenstein ... questions very idea of nature.... In sense that [the creature's] existence subtends our personhood, he figures forth an essentialist view of nature. But insofar as this nature is abject and its stitches are showing, this essence includes arbitrariness and supplementarity.... He is a horrific abject that speaks beautiful Enlightenment prose. (2) Not only Shelley's novel but much of late-romantic British literature runs risk of being overshadowed by critical emphasis its derivative character. As Timothy Morton points out concerning creature itself, any work in which the stitches are showing seems to lose its claim authentic, essential being. Yet, at same time, it provokes meditation arbitrary and fluid nature of identity. Critics have long emphasized stitched together aspect of late at expense of its dynamic, experimental pluralities. The stories they tell about late romantic literature (especially poetry) tend to rationalize neglect to which period has been subject, rather than enable its recovery. Lionel Stevenson refers to third decade of nineteenth century as an amazing hiatus in English poetry, a time when proper becomes vulgarized. Virgil Nemoianu observes that the 1820s and 1830s seem an embarrassment to historian of English literature. The writers of that period (Nemoianu studies Byron, Keats, De Quincey, Peacock, and Scott) tend to produce a lower romanticism reliant on other sources and rewriting. Herbert Tucker sees poetry of 1820s as domesticated, full of home and its attendant tropes, as an art once exotic but now primarily an affair of hearthside or parlor table. For Daniel Riess texts produced in these decades tend to resemble commodities, written amid ever-increasing commodification of literature and visual arts. (3) Vulgarized, diluted, domesticated, commodified--the literature of period hardly stands a chance. Scholars should not be so quick to characterize British literature in 1820s and 1830s as intellectually aimless stuff of a second-hand romanticism. Many works written in these decades are powerful critiques of romanticism. What unites them is a shared interest in renegotiating high romantic model of subjectivity as a coherent, organic, and transhistorical reality--a model that several authors of this period neither quite discard, nor accept as inherited. When we attend to this collective critique, a new and exciting constellation of attempts to remodel romantic subject emerges. Some recent critical accounts illuminate this new field of possibility. …