Mary Robinson and the Idiot's Guide to Sensibility and Oblivion

Abstract

AbstractMary Robinson's now infamous depiction of Sappho's leap into the Leucadian deep at the end of her sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon has been most often read as the poet's celebration or critique of the poetics of sensibility. Understanding this and other moments from her work as arising from the discourse of suicide reveals Robinson working not simply with or against feeling but rather thinking through epistemology more broadly. Beginning with her earliest poems, Robinson repeatedly depicts moments of oblivion that evacuate the ecstasy of sensation and sensibility, or feeling built on empiricist sensation. Sappho, after she becomes stuck singing the same songs of sickly feeling about Phaon, plots her final leap as an exit from an empiricist idiocy – the constant sensing, emoting, and embodying required of the feeling female poet schooled in empiricist epistemology. Placing herself in conversation with friends and philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Robinson skirts both contemporary notions of sentimental and rational suicide. Drawing instead on John Locke's discussion of liberty as the choice to think and forbear to think, exemplified in both Locke and Robinson by cliff leaping, Robinson theorizes suicide as a perverse kind of freedom. Sappho's self‐destruction in the oceanic void figures a radical turn past Enlightenment forms of knowing – particularly those dependent on sensation and passion – to a new epistemological horizon.