Charlotte Smith’s Poetry as Sentimental Discourse

Abstract

IN THE FIELD OF ROMANTIC SCHOLARSHIP CHARLOTTE SMITH'S POETRY HAS in recent years come to be seen as one of most paradigmatic literary sources revealing artistic constructedness of gender. A lot of critical attention has been paid to gender roles and meanings inscribed in her poetry in ways that not only illuminate their textuality but also display how modern critics read gender into Romantic texts, thereby contributing to ongoing revision of established norms of canonicity and tradition. In addition to influence she had on first male Romantics, notably Wordsworth and Coleridge, (1) Smith's enormous importance for literary history and criticism today seems to lie chiefly in deconstructive potential of her work as detected by scholars exploring gendered and generic constructions of subjectivity and poetic identity in Romantic lyric. (2) Stuart Curran maintains that Charlotte Smith was first poet in England whom in retrospect would call Romantic. (3) It can be added that Smith is major poet whose work reveals how deeply and inextricably Romantic tradition is rooted in sentimental. Embodying fusions and hybridizations of what modem literary criticism has come to differentiate as sentimental and Romantic traditions, Smith's poetry not only illustrates their common ground, but also their differential qualities with respect to each other, which, considering their continuity, should be reassessed under categories of sentimental and sublime. As Stephen Behrendt writes, we might consider to what extent Romanticism might fruitfully be delineated by ways in which writers and citizens alike position themselves, at various points in period, in relation to an axis whose poles are Sentimental and Sublime. (4) Against some readings that interpret Smith's poetic self in terms of an absence or failure, not only of sublime but also of subjectivity, I would suggest that her poetry inscribes a poetic subjectivity that is more a positive writing of sentimental than a default of sublime. In his influential article I Altered Curran writes with reference to women poets of Romantic period, including Smith: The humanitarianism of Dissenting tradition makes women poets sympathetic to distress and victimization, but void at center of should alert us to a profound awareness among these poets of being themselves dispossessed, figured through details they do not control, uniting an unstructurable longing of with hard-earned of thingness. Curran's comment seems to carry phenomenological and psycho-social meanings arbitrarily transposed onto actual, aesthetic structure of poetry, and my argument will be implicitly contesting this through Bakhtinian notion of genre as a socio-aesthetic category. (5) I will try to show that consciousness of dispossession and the longing of sensibility inscribed especially in Elegiac Sonnets are deliberately and deftly structured mainly in accordance with generic conventions of literature of sensibility. And sense of Curran attributes to Smith (along with other women poets of period) cannot be located in her poetry insofar as is a discursive mode of subjectivity, and even more fundamentally, insofar as all authorial discourse about self in its relation to others and world is an active enactment of subjectivity in Bakhtinian sense. Karen Weisman also attributes thingness to Smith's poetic self in her sonnets by describing it as perhaps no more animate than hapless Lucy whose death Wordsworth is hauntingly to mourn. (6) Al though Curran defines Smith's poetry as one of sensibility, his comment as well as Weisman's seems to attribute subjectivity only to Romantic/ sublime, and quite arbitrarily denies sentimental's access to subjectivity as well as its capacity for artistic self-possession and mastery. …