“Bitter Memory” Meets “Dark Retrospect”: Charlotte Smith, Satan, and the Politics of Nostalgia in The Emigrants

Abstract

ABSTRACT Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants (1793), a blank verse critique of Revolutionary France during the Terror, probes the unstable connections between sentiment, nostalgia, and political will, especially in the context of gendered political engagement. To do so, Smith aligns herself with Milton’s Satan. She uses this most subversive of Paradise Lost’s characters as a model for articulating her own republican ideals and nostalgic sentiment, which both undermines and feeds her political engagement in the French Emigration Crisis. Comparing passages from The Emigrants and Paradise Lost, I argue that Smith expresses a nostalgia imbued with satanic despair to glean the political use-value of memory. Can politics – especially of a marginalized person – ever be nostalgic, or must it focus on future reform? I argue that Smith’s satanic nostalgia protests the limited forms of political engagement for women in the period, the demands of charity on women, and their social disenfranchisement.