Not a Natural Cri de Coeur: Charlotte Mew's Quotable, Extractable Poetics

Abstract

Critics writing on the poetry of Charlotte Mew have long considered the cri de coeur—often described as an involuntary exclamation of the speaker's, or the poet's, secret suffering—a defining element of Mew's poetics; this focus has contributed to an ongoing critical tendency to read Mew's work as pathologically divided between authentic feeling and artificial performance. Due to Mew's liminal position in literary history—writing from the 1890s through the 1910s—her work is often also read in terms of a struggle between Victorian propriety and modernist innovation. Attending to Mew's own use of the phrase “cri de coeur,” however, shows that she used it not primarily to indicate the expression of deep feeling but as a quotable, extractable catchphrase or tag that might circulate independently from its source text in quite different literary and cultural contexts. Reading Mew's poems “The Farmer's Bride” and “The Fête,” as well as her unpublished short story “Thic Theer Kayser,” with this definition of the cri de coeur in mind reveals a poetics rooted in the lively print and performance cultures of Mew's own lifetime—a flexible, entertaining poetics that challenges conventional understandings of the boundaries of literary periods.