Living to Labour, Labouring to Live: The Problem of Suicide in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets

Abstract

AbstractIn her Elegiac Sonnets, Charlotte Smith presents the reader with a suffering poetic persona, one heavily burdened by a melancholic longing for death as a release from the ills of the world. Although this image of a despairing sentimental heroine cultivates a perception that this persona, or even Smith herself, harbours suicidal intentions, this essay argues that such desires remain inert throughout the sonnet sequence. In comparing Smith's imagining of Werther's suicidal experience – as articulated in a five‐sonnet sequence within the Elegiac Sonnets – with the envisioned dejection of Smith's poetic persona, it is arguable that Smith is, instead, careful to delineate the ways in which these respective experiences diverge, and how the persistence of reason in particular, as both a blessing and a curse, prevents Smith's speaker from following Werther to the grave. Finally, it is a further reminder that (literary) suicide, often seen as the quintessentially transcendent Romantic destiny, was not a viable option for Romantic female writers who aspired to sympathetic identification and elegiac remembrance.