Radcliffe's Poetic Legacy: Female Confinement in the “Gothic Sonnet”

Abstract

Radcliffe's sweeping, panoramic scenes of loco-description have often been deemed poetical in style, and previous scholarship has commented on the poetical influences on her prose. But while Radcliffe's novels are often posed as capacious tomes that absorbed the conventions of many other modes of writing, to what extent did her writing influence genres other than the Gothic novel itself? How did Radcliffe's novels and the Gothic tradition impact nineteenth-century poetry? This article traces Gothic themes from novels by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew “Monk” Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft that came to shape the Romantic and Victorian sonnet tradition. Through close readings of important nineteenth-century metasonnets by William Wordsworth, John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it shows how the language of trapped female bodies and spatial confinement was incorporated by poets to create a tradition of “Gothic sonnets”. Such sonnets utilize the imagery of female bondage as an analogy for the formal limitations of the sonnet's 14 lines, rigid rhyme and strict meter.