Manipulating Through Poems: Composition, Emotions, and Agency in Amelia Opie’s The Only Child; or, Portia Bellenden

Abstract

ABSTRACT Amelia Opie’s novels have typically been received as following the structure of the fallen-woman plot. This article reveals how Opie’s late understudied novel The Only Child; or, Portia Bellenden (1821) forms a radical departure from this genre as the heroine uses her skill in writing and poetry composition to orchestrate for another character to die in her place. Using recent approaches in cognitive narratology, in particular the theory of predictive processing, I analyse how Portia utilises composition to manipulate emotions and genre expectations, and thus attain agency over plot events. This new cognitive account of composition’s representation demonstrates how the novel’s original poems model a method for constructing decisions that depart patriarchal scripted narratives. The cognitive approach to composition reveals how the novel’s radical politics lie, not in offering specific political values, but in demonstrating how the reader can use composition to interrogate gendered ideologies that are represented as moral behaviour.