Charlotte Smith’s Forms of Protest

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the ways in which Romantic author Charlotte Turner Smith mounts a subtle but invasive protest against differing structures of power. I seek first to establish Smith’s forms of protest as subtle, often hidden behind the persona of a genteel lady, a suffering mother, or a damsel in distress. Though Smith’s use of these personae as a way for her to embody a variety of subject positions is critically well-established, less attention has been paid to Smith’s protests against formal structures and the ways in which certain forms provide constraints for the woman writer. This article explores the ways in which Smith enacts her own particular form of protest in her third novel, Celestina (1791), in which she explores a hybrid form, blending poetry and narrative, to think through how these forms are interpreted by writers and readers. Smith establishes the competing desires of the poet and her audience in order to protest against a constraining type of literary interpretation which upholds an arbitrary separation of literary forms. Rather, Smith argues, the true power of protest can be captured through hybridization of these forms and a style of interpretation which embraces formal complexity.