Flesh and Roses: Michael Field's metaphors of pleasure and desire

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines through detailed, connective readings, the metaphors of female sensuality/sexuality that run through and across the poetry and journals of Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Patterns and a marked unity of reference and imaging create a language in which to speak of that thing which has no legal or social existence, eroticised love between women. Apparently transparent and orthodox images of the natural world are transformed through context and repetition into ambiguous, multifaceted renderings of sensual experiences and desires that are irreducible to linear, clear statements. The essay focuses on material from the volumes of poetry and the manuscript journals from the middle period of their writing together, after the development of “Michael Field” as a discrete identity, prior to the conversions to Catholicism, to map these metaphoric shifts and shifting repetitions, concluding where they themselves concluded, in the final poems and the final journal entries.