(De)figurating the feminine: the vengeful woman figuration in Anne Bannerman’s poetry

Abstract

This article focuses on the introduction of two poems by the barely-known Scottish poet Anne Bannerman, “The Mermaid” (1800) and “The Dark Ladie” (1802), as exponents of what we call the vengeful woman figuration, a recurrent representation in nineteenth-century Britain. These characters use violence as a tool for vengeance, which leads them, in a post-gender perspective, to desexualization. Thus, unsexed, they are able to get rid of a limiting and restrictive feminine towards a more dispersed, rhizomatic experience, which encompasses different feminines.