Charlotte Smith's Melancholia on the Page and Stage

Abstract

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 [End Page 563] 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.