felicia hemans's feminist poetry of the mid 1820s

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Felicia Hemans's Feminist PoetryOf The Mid 1820SJames Holt McGavran Jr.Published online: 13 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: James Holt McGavran Jr. (2014) Felicia Hemans's Feminist Poetry OfThe Mid 1820S, Women's Writing, 21:4, 540-558, DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2013.864152

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James Holt McGavran, Jr.

FELICIA HEMANS’S FEMINIST POETRY OF

THE MID 1820S

During the mid 1820s, Felicia Hemans became an ardent, if conflicted, feministwho wrote two long poems and several shorter ones in which she railed thrillinglyagainst the mortal dangers for British families inherent in the testosterone-drivenideology of manly patriotic sacrifice, and argued instead for the life-giving andlife-restoring power to be found in woman-centered, but regendered, images ofhome, community and peace. The author concentrates on two major works: TheSiege of Valencia (1823), Hemans’s most often misunderstood long poem, andThe Forest Sanctuary (1825), in which she takes her vision of a regenderedfuture the furthest. However, the author also examines several of her short lyrics,including the two best known—“Casabianca” (1826) and “The Homes of England”(1827)—along with a few of the harrowing suicide poems from Records of Woman(1828), where aggrieved women dramatically kill themselves (and sometimes theirchildren) to express rage and despair against the men in their lives. Whateverstories these poems tell, and however much her feminism flew beneath both thepopular and critical radar, they radiate excoriating irony directed towards thepatriarchal establishment of her time.

Wisely and wryly articulating the problem Felicia Hemans has posed forfeminists, Anne Mellor asked 20 years ago: “What happens when a Romanticwoman writer chooses to inhabit rather than reject the hegemonic constructionof the ideal woman?” Try as they might, Hemans critics like Mellor and MarlonRoss1 could not crack the iconic image of fastidious, pious Tory femininityHemans created for herself, with the posthumous help of Victorian critics likeGeorge Gilfillan, who found her feminine “nature” “more interesting than hergenius or than its finest productions”, and declared unequivocally that she was“not, in a transcendent sense, a poet”.2 Plotting end runs around the icon,recent critics have praised her as canon-maker, patriot and Christian apologist.3

Others have admired the surprisingly good business sense they found inHemans’s determination to keep her boys in school by tailoring her new workto changes in public taste, and thus selling more books.4 But in so doing, wasHemans compromising her strongest beliefs to appeal to her public or, as DavidLatané has recently suggested, was she “consciously pulling the wool over their

Women's Writing, 2014Vol. 21, No. 4, 540–558, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2013.864152© 2013 Taylor & Francis

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2013.864152

eyes” with the help of her mostly Tory critics5—feminine on the surface,feminist in her heart, poetess for many, but prophet of change for those whocould read against the grain? As Susan Wolfson has slyly commented: “Hemanshad more going on than ‘Mrs. Hemans’ let on”.6

This is “my” Hemans, but she is not “mine” alone: besides Latané, StephenBehrendt, Paula Feldman, Anthony John Harding, Gary Kelly, Jerome McGannand Wolfson all precede me in emphasizing a strong feminist element they findin her texts.7 She may have hinted at this herself in an October 1828 letterabout her poems:

Whatever they may contain of character at all peculiar to themselves,began, I think, to develop itself in the volume of the Siege of Valencia, an[dI] attribute this greatly to my having gained courage, about that time, andnot before, to draw from my own thoughts and feelings.8

This courage came, interestingly enough, after her husband abandoned her andtheir five sons; it was followed by extraordinary poetic productivity andrelative happiness, at least partly because, unencumbered by domestic duties,Hemans still had her beloved mother to act as the angel in her house.9 Herphysical strength began to ebb and her world view turned darker following hermother’s death early in 1827, but even before that her poetry chronicledrecords of many women—those who could imagine a life beyond the genderedentrapments of the early nineteenth century, and those who succumbed, oftenamidst terrible violence, to the status quo.

Still, during the mid 1820s, Hemans became an ardent, if conflicted,feminist who wrote two long poems and several shorter ones in which sherailed thrillingly against the mortal dangers for British families inherent in theideology of manly patriotic sacrifice, arguing instead for the life-giving and life-restoring power to be found in woman-centered, but regendered, images ofhome, community and peace. Like Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1818), sheemphasizes the deadly consequences not only for the fighting men, but also forthe wives and children whom the patriarchy ostensibly supports and protects—a demographic which, of course, included herself and her sons. I shallconcentrate on two major works of what Joselyn M. Almeida has called the“Anglo-Hispanic imaginary”10: the verse drama The Siege of Valencia (1823) andThe Forest Sanctuary (1825), which she regarded “as her best”11 and in which shetakes her vision of a regendered future the furthest. But I shall also considerseveral of her short lyrics, including the two best known—“Casabianca” (1826)and “The Homes of England” (1827)—along with a few of the harrowingsuicide poems from Records of Woman (1828), where aggrieved womendramatically kill themselves (and sometimes their children) to express rageand despair against the men in their lives.

F E L I C I A H EMANS ’S F EM I N I S T POETRY 5 4 1

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Wolfson has written of Hemans that: “What was genuine in this woman ofgenius was an oppositional sensibility, and a willingness to expose it”.12Wolfson precedes me in tracing opposition in The Siege of Valencia,13 guidedperhaps by a prescient comment she quotes from Hemans’s friend and earlybiographer Henry Chorley. Alone among critics in her century to grasp theanti-patriarchal “treachery” of Hemans’s “strong, fervid, indignant” verses,Chorley saw the poem driven by “a thrilling conflict between maternal love andthe inflexible spirit of chivalrous honour”.14 Hemans uses her main characterElmina, the aristocratic Spanish wife and mother, to point the way beyondchivalrous honor into a gender-neutral future. When Tricia Lootens wrote that“Hemans […] may chart a deadly collision course between female figures and astate whose brutality is implicitly unveiled as senseless”, she must have hadElmina in mind.15 Preparing the reader for Elmina is “Elysium”, the openingpoem in The Siege of Valencia volume, which begins with a chauvinistic epigraphfrom Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme (1802):

In the Elysium of the ancients, we find none but heroes and persons whohad either been fortunate or distinguished on earth; the children, andapparently the slaves and lower classes, that is to say, Poverty, Misfortune,and Innocence, were banished to the infernal regions.16

That Chateaubriand does not mention women as a category, let alone assignthem a place either in heaven or hell, surely galled Hemans enormously, notleast because it paralleled women’s non-existence in British law in her time.After powerful stanzas on peasant and slave, and a mother who has lost a child,her bitter final lines confirm this: “But not with thee might aught save Glorydwell—/—Fade, fade away, thou shore of Asphodel!”17 Thus, Hemansironically heralds the possibility that a woman who rejects Chateaubriand’sheroism, even while witnessing the deaths of her husband and children, maytriumph over such heroism with a new kind of bravery and deserve eternalrecognition more than they. As John-David Lopez has written in hisilluminating study of Hemans’s sources for The Siege of Valencia, the poem“offers a view of a progressive Hemans, challenging the values of state andpatriarch she has generally been assumed to champion”.18 In a similar argumentbased on the British affinity for Hispanic settings, Jeffrey Cass has declared that:“the use of the Spanish imaginary by women writers occasionally threatens thetriumphalist and patriarchal ethos of nationalism that seeks to stave off feministcritiques of the subaltern status of women within the culture”.19

It is true that Hemans’s headnote to The Siege of Valencia claims she has

[…] feebly attempted “to describe high passions and high actions”; byconnecting a religious feeling with the patriotism and high-minded loyalty

5 4 2 WOMEN ’S WR I T I NG

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which had thus been proved “faithful unto death,” and by surrounding herideal dramatis personae with recollections derived from the heroic legendsof Spanish chivalry.20

It is true also that Elmina’s behaviour in The Siege of Valencia alternates betweeneloquent denunciations of patriarchy and stereotypical weak-woman gestures:at different moments she actually flings herself at the feet of both her husbandGonzalez and the Muslim leader Abdullah. To readers who do not hear herverbal irony, it may seem that Hemans is swooning with joy to recount thesechauvinistic stories of glorious warriors and collapsible women. But Elmina’shigh passions count for far more with Hemans than those of her male warriors,and the blood-soaked ballad Elmina’s daughter Ximena sings to open the playforefronts the death that war always brings to parents and children alike:

The ground is wet—but not with rain—We have been in war array,

And the noblest blood of Christian SpainHath bathed her soil to-day.I have seen the strong man die,And the stripling meet his fate,

Where the mountain-winds go sounding by,In the Roncesvalles’ Strait. (178–79, scene 1, lines 17–24)

It is almost literally nauseating to read these lines of red soil, of the deaths ofstrong men and stripling boys; they all too clearly foreshadow the horrors notonly of The Siege of Valencia, but of The Forest Sanctuary and “Casabianca” as well.It is highly ironic that Ximena sings these lines rather than Elmina, whose viewand Hemans’s they express, since in the mother–daughter dialogue that followsit becomes clear that Ximena has switched her loyalty from her mother’sfeminist pacifism to her father Gonzalez’s belligerent machismo—an attitudewhich ultimately assures his own death and that of all three of his children:Ximena herself and her two brothers Alphonso and Carlos.

Elmina, who does not know they have been captured by the Moorish princeAbdullah, imagines her sons safe and happy in the mountains outside thebesieged city, where, in an echo of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (1798),they “Bound in glad boyhood, e’en as torrent-streams / Leap brightly from theheights” (180, scene 1, lines 76–77); but Ximena responds with scantadmiration for such peaceful frolics:

Should not a hero’s child be train’d to hearThe trumpet’s blast unstartled, and to lookIn the fix’d face of Death without dismay? (180, scene 1, lines 88–90)


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Elmina, horrified, responds:

Woe! Woe! That aught so gentle and so youngShould thus be call’d to stand i’ the tempest’s path,And bear the token and the hue of deathOn a bright soul so soon! (180, scene 1, lines 91–94)

She concludes, “We are fall’n / On dark and evil days!” (180, scene 1, lines97–98), and thus elicits an even harsher response from her militantdaughter:

[…] Aye, days that wakeAll to their tasks!—Youth may not loiter nowIn the green walks of spring; and womanhoodIs summon’d unto conflicts, heretoforeThe lot of warrior-souls. But we will takeOur toils upon us nobly! (181, scene 1, lines 98–103)

Ximena responds to the siege by masculinizing herself: donning the armor—literal and figurative—of the patriarchy and thus becoming a poster child forenthralled and ultimately suicidal adherence to male rules of bravery. One ofthe most moving poems in Hemans’s later Records of Woman series—“Joan ofArc, in Rheims” (1826)—inscribes a double gender shift when the Maidof Orleans, on leaving the cathedral where she has seen the dauphin crownedand herself glorified for her manly courage, hears her name called,recognizes her father’s voice, and sees him and her beloved brothers fromhome. Joan’s father, however, unlike Ximena’s, is a gentle old countryman“in the calm beauty of his silver hair”;21 in his voice she hears the forestmusic of her girlhood home, releases her hair out of her helmet, “wept forjoy, and said”:

Bless me, my father, bless me! and with thee,To the still cabin and the beechen-tree,Let me return! (Records 61, lines 85–88)

Her desperate cry to her father expresses a hopeless desire to escape themasculine role she is now playing; it also echoes the traditional beginning of theconfessional: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned”. Hemans thus implies that itis wrong for a woman to attempt such masculinzation because women’sknowledge is what will save the world; in their turn, men must become moregentle, more peaceful, like Jacques D’Arc and the father in The Forest Sanctuary.The final lines of the poem are heavy with the irony that only by her


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martyrdom can Joan achieve the patriarchal crown of glory usually reservedfor men:

And bought alone by gifts beyond all price,The trusting heart’s repose, the paradiseOf home with all its loves, doth fate allowThe crown of glory unto woman’s brow. (Records 62, lines 93–96)

Ximena, too, buys glory with her life.There is no such crown for Elmina, who finally realizes, with horror and

fury, what her husband is telling her: her sons are being held by the vileAbdullah, who captured them because, as Gonzalez puts it:

[…] our brave Alphonso, in the prideOf boyish daring, left our mountain-halls,With his young brother [Carlos], eager to beholdThe face of noble war. (183, scene 1, lines 201–04)

In other words, the boys were captured because he had taught them howfabulous “noble war” is and they decided to leave home to watch the fightingup close. Wolfson observes that: “[The Siege of Valencia’s] languages aresaturated with national myths, codes of honor, definitions of masculinepatriotism, and religious sanctions that govern political and domestic life”.22

Elmina’s fury when she realizes her sons are being held by the Muslims addsanother language, as it leads to one of the great English denunciationsof patriarchy, which should rank alongside that of Mary Wollstonecraft inA Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792):

[…] Oh, cold and hard of heart!Thou shouldst be born for empire, since thy soulThus lightly from all human bonds can freeIts haughty flight!— Men! men! too much is yoursOf vantage; ye, that with a sound, a breath,A shadow, thus can fill the desolate spaceOf rooted up affections, o’er whose voidOur yearning hearts must wither!—So it is,Dominion must be won!—Nay, leave me not—My heart is bursting, and I must be heard! (185, scene 1, lines 272–81)

Although he starts to walk away from her, Gonzalez, at least for now, does notshow open anger at Elmina after her attack on his obsession with “dominion”;


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he just tells her that her desire to capitulate to Abdullah to save her sons wouldwrap them and the whole family in “th’ indignant flush of shame” (185, scene1, line 287). Unimpressed by this, she later contrasts mothers’ and fathers’love for their children, asserting that fathers use their offspring, especially theirsons, only to project their own name and fame:

[…] It is but pride, wherewithTo his fair son the father’s eye doth turn,Watching his growth. Aye, on the boy he looks,The bright glad creature springing in his path,But as the heir of his great name, the youngAnd stately tree, whose rising strength ere longShall bear his trophies well.—And this is love!This is man’s love! (189, scene 1, lines 432–39)

Going out to seek help for her sons, she first encounters Hernandez, a formerwarrior turned priest, who is far more bloodthirsty than Gonzalez. He hasaccidentally, yet not really accidentally, killed his own son in battle afterrejecting him for falling in love with a Muslim woman, and he has turned tothe priesthood not for repentance or solace, but because in orders he may exaltGod and country. He thus embodies the linkage of priesthood, machismo andbloody violence to which Hemans will return in The Forest Sanctuary with itsevocation of the Inquisition—which, Nanora Sweet points out, had beenrevived in Spain in 1823.23 Hernandez rebukes Elmina by saying what Hemanswants us to think of him:

—And who are thou, that, in the littlenessOf thine own selfish purpose, would’st set boundsTo the free current of all noble thoughtAnd generous action, bidding its bright wavesBe stay’d, and flow no further? (198–99, scene 2, lines 202–06)

Consumed with conscious loathing of the enemy and unconscious guiltover his son, Hernandez is about as far from the “free current of all noblethought / And generous action” as anyone could be; he indignantly refusesto help Elmina to pass the city gates in order to see her sons in theenemy camp.

Horrified at his story but strengthened in her determination, Elmina enliststhe aid of an old servant, Diego, and disguises herself as a male warrior inmantle and helmet (210, stage direction) to penetrate with Diego to whereAbdullah is holding the boys. Unlike her daughter, Elmina is not donning


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masculinist ideology, just male clothing; she uses the cross-dressing disguise toget access to her enemy and her sons, and then immediately removes it todemonstrate her womanly courage—a bravery at least equal to that of herhusband or daughter. Even before he recognizes his mother, her older son,Alphonso, already indoctrinated by his father, is indignant at the idea of beingapproached, let alone helped, by a servant and clearly would rather die: “Icould weep burning tears / For very shame!” (210, scene 4, lines 66–67).Only his little brother, Carlos, still untouched by macho noble-death ideology,is overjoyed to see the old servant; then, upon recognizing Elmina, he cries outwith an impossible hope: “Sweet mother! now / Thou shalt not leave us more”(211, scene 4, lines 87–88); again later, in heartbreaking despair, he begs her:“Wilt thou go? / Oh! let me follow thee!” (214, scene 4, lines 206–07).Elmina has a moment of triumph as she claims her courage is greater than thatof Abdullah or of male warriors generally:

[…]—I have no thought,No sense of fear!—Thou’rt mighty! but a soulWound up like mine is mightier, in the powerOf that one feeling, pour’d through all its depths,Than monarchs with their hosts!—Am I not comeTo die with these, my children? (211, scene 4, lines 97–102)

But she will not die with them, unlike some of Hemans’s later female heroeswho find a welcome release in death. Nevertheless, soon thereafter, like hercreator, she plays the iconic weak-woman role expected of her, prostratingherself in front of Abdullah to beg for her sons’ lives. Showing how well he haslearned his father’s lessons, Alphonso tries to raise her, scolding:

Thou shouldst not kneelUnto this infidel!—Rise, rise, my mother!This sight doth shame our house! (211, scene 4, lines 119–21)

Offstage, Elmina makes a worthless deal with Abdullah to yield him the city inexchange for her children’s lives. The Muslims invade Valencia; Ximena ralliesthe citizens to a deadly battle; and the boys are slaughtered in front ofGonzalez, who shortly afterwards is fatally wounded and dies as the King ofCastile finally arrives with reinforcements to drive away the heathens. Justbefore her father’s death, Ximena also dies, not of battle wounds, but in astrange Liebestod of womanly grief and despair because her secret lover, a white-plumed warrior, has been killed, apparently a victim like her father of her ownearlier war-mongering rhetoric. As she confesses this to her mother, it seemsin her final moments that she abandons her martial ferocity, sees her now lost


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love as more valuable than military victory, and cannot go on living withouthim. Even so, in her final, wild speech, she cries:

I see it still!’Tis floating, like a glorious cloud on high,My father’s banner! (241, scene 8, lines 136–38)

Elmina has by this point much repented to her husband—again playing theweak woman in the system—for interfering on behalf of their sons. She hasconfessed, “The Christian city hath been bought and sold! / They will admitthe Moor!” (222, scene 5, lines 259–60), and, as she did earlier with Abdullah,she has thrown herself at Gonzalez’s feet, saying, “Woe, shame and woe, / Areon me in their might!—forgive, forgive!” (223, scene 5, lines 292–93), only tohear his indignant response as he runs out to receive his mortal wound:

Doth the Moor deem that I have part or share,Or counsel in this vileness?—Stay me not!Let go thy hold—’tis powerless on me now—I linger here while treason is at work! (223, scene 5, lines 294–97)

After yet another fall-at-his-feet scene, Gonzalez, about to die, relents and isreconciled to Elmina, who lovingly supports him both literally and figurativelywhile he sees the Castilian reinforcements arrive. The death-obsessedHernandez comforts the dying Gonzalez as only he can, asserting that Spanish“blood shall wash / Our soil from stains of bondage” (251, scene 9, lines 188–89), and continuing:

Oh, blest in death!Chosen of Heaven, farewell!—Look on the Cross,And part from earth in peace! (251, scene 9, lines 192–94)

And Gonzalez is pathetic, perhaps delusional like his daughter, in his last words:

[…] Now charge once more!God is with Spain, and Santiago’s swordIs reddening all the air!—Shout forth “Castile”!The day is ours!—I go; but fear ye not!For Afric’s lance is broken, and my sonsHave won their first good field! (252, scene 9, lines 194–99)

What have his poor sons won? They have lost their lives in the flower of theiryouth—their childhood, really—and there is so much blood in the air that it


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seems more a victory for Dracula than for Spain. Elmina stands by her man tosecure the hero’s burial that he would have expected. But although, as Wolfsonsays, Hemans’s “assertive women take no joy in their power”,24 Elminaremains finally unrepentant; there is irony, even a heartbroken mockery, in hervoice as well:

—How, know ye notThat all array’d for triumph, crown’d and robedWith the strong spirit which hath saved the land,Ev’n now a conqueror to his rest is gone?—Fear not to break that sleep, but let the windSwell on with victory’s shout!—He will not hear—Hath earth a sound more sad? (252, scene 9, lines 209–15)

This is the sadness of fatal victory: Elmina’s final line here undercuts herprevious capitulations. Hemans shows us there is another strong spirit at workthat, while unsuccessful here, could truly save Spain. Alternating as it doeswith her moments of apparent guilt and remorse, Elmina’s feminismnonplussed earlier feminist critics Mellor and Ross; they recognize her anti-patriarchal point of view, but seem compelled to see it as naive and ineffective—a weak delusion she must later abandon. Mellor sees Elmina’s survival “as anironic affirmation of Hemans’ domestic ideology, the triumph of maternal loveover a futile heroism”, and calls the poem “the story of her suffering, hertragedy”. But there is more to Hemans’s ideology than maternal love ordomesticity, and her feminism makes Elmina’s survival a triumph, not atragedy. Contrary to what Mellor claims, there is no “emptiness at the core ofher domestic ideology”;25 there is a vision. Ross, one of the first late twentieth-century critics to take Hemans seriously, has wisely written that: “Hemansrepeatedly explores the complex relation between the state and the hearth […]More than learning how to act in the world, her characters learn how to feel ina world where most actions are futile”. For Elmina, I believe, this is affirming,even redeeming knowledge because it enables her to live on after the rest ofher family are dead. But Ross also insists that “her heroic attempt to save herchildren […] has been misplaced”, and he continues: “Her affection is thentransferred to the state, as she comes to realize the continuity between politicalfreedom and domestic happiness. Finally, she heroically accepts her fate as astate widow”. But Elmina has neither transferred her affection nor accepted apatriarchal fate of any kind; she sees not continuity, only violent disjunctionbetween what men call political freedom and domestic happiness. According toRoss, Hemans intends “the feminization of culture at large [but] intertwinedwith a Tory ideology of state nationalism, British imperialism, religiousconservatism, and feminine conventionalism”.26 This ideology is certainly


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present in The Siege of Valencia, but the grotesque priest of death, Hernandez, isits chief spokesman, and it does not intertwine with, but continues to standapart from, the regendering of culture which is Hemans’s true project andhope for the future. Elmina lives on at the end of the play not like a tragicCreon brought to confront his hubris, but as a hero of consciousness who hasseen her way to the better world, even though she could not take herself or herfamily there.

Ironically, it is the unnamed male hero of The Forest Sanctuary—the formerconquistador turned Protestant single parent—who most fully realizes thepoet’s dream of a regendered life. Perhaps Hemans is suggesting that her visionwill never be realized until men, with their greater power to act in the world,adopt it as well as women. Perhaps, while still targeting British chauvinism, shewanted to make her anti-Catholic position even clearer than she did in The Siegeof Valencia. Here, she directly associates the Mass itself with the slaughter in theauto-da-fé to come:

Sounds of triumphant praise!—the mass was sung—Voices that die not might have pour’d such strains![…]It died away;—the incense-cloud was drivenBefore the breeze—the words of doom were said (281, Part First, lines433–34, 442–43)

Perhaps she wanted to show, in her portrayal of the Spaniard’s Catholic wife,that women can be some of the most insistent rearguard supporters ofpatriarchy: the sniveling Leonor—fearful that her husband will go to hell forturning away from the Church of Rome—presents the mirror opposite of thebold Ximena, yet both do all they can for church and country. Commenting onThe Forest Sanctuary, Anthony Harding notes Hemans’s “transgression of genderboundaries” and admires “the way the male narrator expresses profoundpaternal tenderness toward his young son, whom he has brought with him intoexile to protect him from the violence of the Inquisition”.27 Gary Kelly takesgender boundaries further, asserting that, in the face of the Inquisition’sterrors, Hemans “both exposes history as negatively masculine and counter-poses to it a feminine or feminized history—past, present and, implicitly,future”; “Hemans’s feminized conquistador […] remains as a model of thevanguard consciousness of the post-Revolutionary world”.28 He turns awayfrom the death-bound Catholic faith to a generic Protestantism based onreading the Bible and praying directly to Jesus without priestly intercession.The narrator may be the more disposed to value a nurturing yet manlykindness because, years earlier, when he and his best friend Alvar foughtIndians together in the Andes, it was Alvar, now a casualty of the Inquisition


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with his two sisters, who nursed and protected him after he received a lancewound (276, Part First, lines 255–60). Certainly, Alvar, like the conquistador’smemory of him, places both of them in line with other kind, motherly literarymen we may recall from this period, such as Henry Clerval and old, blind MrDeLacey in Frankenstein, not to mention Joan of Arc’s father Jacques.

The narrator of The Forest Sanctuary begins with an acute loneliness—ahomesickness that appears in many other Hemans poems. Not only in “Joan ofArc, in Rheims”, but among the Miscellaneous Pieces (1828) in “The SicilianCaptive” (1825), “The Adopted Child” (1826), “A Voyager’s Dream of Land”(1825) and “The Palm-Tree” (1828?), the main characters live or die in theirrespective diasporas, yearning for the sights and sounds of the woman-centeredworlds they left or were wrenched away from. Here, the narrator’s mal du paysis almost crippling to his brave new life, until he recalls the mental and moralsickness of Spain and the physical and spiritual suffering he encountered there:

The voices of my home!—I hear them still!They have been with me through the dreamy night—The blessed household voices[…]—my native Spain!My own bright land—my father’s land—my child’s!What hath thy son brought from thee to the wilds?He hath brought marks of torture and the chain[…]And heavy boomings of a dull, deep bell,A dead pause following each (269–70, Part First, lines 1–3, 40–43,121–22)

This is the confusion that Nanora Sweet has related to the Freudian unheimlich:“an uncanny recollection simultaneously of home and banishment fromhome”, where “[t]he New World’s ‘forest sanctuary’ cannot supplant thecathedrals of the Old; they are part of its psychic architecture”.29 Afterconverting to Protestantism, being imprisoned and guided only by his new faithand a vision of life with his wife and child, he is released and returns home onlylong enough to escort them to a ship that will take them to the New World.His emancipation is not explained; Hemans may even wish to imply by thissudden and improbable freedom that everything which follows is a fantasy thatcould never occur. Even so, the vision is there. Realizing after his wife’s deathon board the ship that South America, his first destination, was still tooSpanish, too Catholic and too macho for him, the narrator has taken his son “toseek the wilds of the red hunter’s land”; they form a community of two in their


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“bower of refuge” (315, Part Second, lines 646–47). Now sunset in NorthAmerica reminds him of the same time of day in Spain. Here, too, there isdeep irony: Hemans has already shown that the “vesper-melody” he hears isquite literally one of “dying bells”—the obsessive “dull, deep bells” and “deadpauses” that announced the auto-da-fé earlier in the poem. He concludes hisnarrative by telling that, while his child is sleeping, he looks to the stars, lonelylike him, and finds God’s presence there:

[…]—and I am here,Living again through all my life’s farewells,In these vast woods, where farewell ne’er was spoken,

And sole I lift to Heaven a sad heart—yet unbroken![…]I look forth on the stars—the shadowy sleepOf forests—and the lake, whose gloomy deepSends up red sparkles to the fire-flies’ light.A lonely world!—ev’n fearful to man’s thought,

But for His presence felt, whom here my soul hath sought. (316–17, PartSecond, lines 679–82, 696–700)

Hemans could only imagine North America, since she never traveled there, butshe manages to prewrite one of Thoreau’s most beautiful lines in Walden: “Timeis but the stream I go a-fishing in” (first published in 1854). Like Elmina in TheSiege of Valencia, the Spaniard lives on after all his life’s farewells. But he isluckier: he has the boy and can look forward to their future together.Moreover, it is important that in this most forward-looking of her explorationsof gender issues, Hemans emphasizes the Spaniard’s Christian hope as well: thevatic religious power that Julie Melnyk traces in Hemans’s later poetry sitscomfortably here within the mind and soul of the regendered Spaniard.

“Casabianca” has provoked insightful, even amusing comments by recentcritics such as Isobel Armstrong, who defines the “burning deck” as the site ofthe young victim’s imminent puberty and the onset of Oedipal conflict with hisfather, and Catherine Robson, who sees the deck doubling as the dais or stagefrom which countless nineteenth-century children had to recite the poem frommemory.30 Exploring the text, Wolfson asserts that “Casabianca links preciousfilial piety to horrific, pointless martyrdom”,31 but what Hemans really showsus is that filial piety is not precious in either sense of the word—neithervaluable nor dainty—since it reinscribes patriarchal ideals relentlessly onEngland’s sons and daughters. Indeed, the short poem for which Hemans thedomestic icon, the poetess, has been most widely praised and most viciously


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satirized is the one in which she most clearly and unequivocally damnsmachismo as the loathsome source of child death:

He called aloud:—“Say, Father, sayIf yet my task is done?”

He knew not that the chieftain layUnconscious of his son. (429, lines 13–16)

Because the father has died, the son must also perish. Critics from Wolfson toGary Kelly have written about Romantic death in Hemans.32 But what wastruly “Romantic”, truly visionary, for Hemans was hope for a new life for thechildren of England and their parents. She describes young Giacomo JocanteCasabianca as “beautiful and bright”, “a proud, though child-like form”immolated in the “wreathing fires” that “wrapt the ship in splendor wild” and“caught the flag on high” (428–29, lines 5, 8, 28, 29, 30); her purpose is notonly to glorify the child’s beauty, but to indict the wars between burning flags,the nation states they represent and the fathers who promulgate this suicidalideology. As Tricia Lootens has eloquently written: “The scene is a damningenactment of the brutal waste of war, of the deadly implications of patriarchalhonor, and of the betrayal of familial ties by adults intent on that honor”.33 Thefact that Hemans had already published The Siege of Valencia and The ForestSanctuary clearly gives further impetus to this interpretation.34

In her breakthrough edition of Hemans’s Records of Woman, Paula Feldmannotes that “The Homes of England” (1827)—which, like “Casabianca”, wasextremely popular throughout the nineteenth century—was often read out ofcontext, but, Feldman continues, if we recall that, after its initial publication inBlackwood’s, it was placed “immediately following the elegiac ‘Records ofWoman’” collection with its dramatis personae of strong but often doomedwomen, “the celebratory ‘Homes of England’ seems ironic”.35 Indeed, thisHemans text cries out for a deconstructive reading, especially in its final stanza:

The free, fair Homes of England!Long, long, in hut and hall,

May hearts of native proof be rear’dTo guard each hallow’d wall!

And green forever be the groves,And bright the flowery sod,

Where first the child’s glad spirit lovesIts country and its God! (Hemans, Records 90, lines 33–40)

Hemans’s true subject is the unsolvable paradox of attempting to rear “heartsof native proof”—or indeed any young hearts at all—in a society that worships


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patriotism and piety, and the death they continuously spawn; groves will not begreen, but red; sod will continue to be bright with unnecessary bloodshed. In aconversation article on the possibilities of reimagining Romantic-era literaryhistory that takes “Homes” as Exhibit A, Jerome McGann approvingly quotesKingsley Amis, who called another short Hemans text, “The Graves of aHousehold”, a “superficially superficial piece”, “for it calls attention to thispoetry’s deep involvement in the exposition of wealth and power as spectacle,ideology, superficies”.36 According to McGann: “Hemans’ is a poetry ofquotation, a conscious elevation of various inherited and signifying signs”, apoetry of “idolatries, monuments, and illusions”—a poetry of clichés. But“Homes” is not merely a gloom-laden pastiche of traditional pieties in eclipse:under the surface, as McGann says, lies “an imagination of a communal worldheld together by sympathy”.37 Hemans places Scott’s belligerent question fromMarmion—“Where’s the coward that would not dare / To fight for such aland?”—as an epigraph above the text of “Homes”,38 and, with Mellor, wecould read this as evidence of traditional pieties not in eclipse, but in fullsway39—until we realize that the “land” Hemans imagines is not to be definedby nation or battle.

Looking back, we can see evidence of these responses to patriarchaltradition in some of the most upsettingly suicidal “Records” Hemans wrote. In“The Bride of the Greek Isle” (1825) and “The Indian Woman’s Death Song”(1827?), the widowed bride Eudora and the nameless (Native American) Indianmother can strike against patriarchy only by dying—Eudora by torching theship of the pirates who killed her new husband and immolating herself in theflames, and the Indian woman, whose philandering husband has deserted her,by paddling the canoe carrying herself and her infant daughter over a cataract:

And thou, my babe! tho’ born, like me, for woman’s weary lot,Smile!—to that wasting of the heart, my own! I leave thee not;Too bright a thing art thou to pine in aching love away,Thy mother bears thee far, young Fawn! from sorrow and decay. (Hemans,Records 58, lines 36–39)

Like the slave mother in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) who kills her daughterto prevent a life of servitude, the young Indian woman would rather kill herchild than see her performing “woman’s weary lot”. But unlike Morrison’sSethe, she kills herself too, apparently unable to imagine, let alone shape, anindependent future. In another poem, “The Indian City” (1825), there is bothchild death and revenge, but it is followed by strange sympathy. A Muslim boyis murdered for defiling a holy Hindu stream by swimming in it. At first, hismother Maimuna’s grief empowers her in the patriarchal manner: masculiniz-ing herself like Joan and Ximena, she vows bloody revenge, and she incites


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Muslim soldiers to destroy the Hindu city where her son died. But finding shecan take no pleasure in the destruction when it occurs, she longs only to dieand be buried next to her son. Sadly, almost as if demented, she sings a cradlesong in front of her avenging warriors and then gives a command:

Give him proud burial at my side!There, by yon lake, where the palm-boughs wave,When the temples are fallen, make there our grave. (Hemans, Records 53,lines 208–10)

Only when all the temples sacred to the old pieties have been swept away—notjust architectural structures, but those whose location is inside the humanbrain—can a new society of sharing be born. Until then, women like Eudora,the Indian Woman and Maimuna are trapped in an in-between existence, a life-in-death that makes their self-destructive acts both more affecting and, sadly,less surprising. Susan Wolfson has noted the implicit complementarity ofWollstonecraft’s title Rights of Woman in Hemans’s Records of Woman.40 Unlikeher predecessor, who prescribed for her whole sex but avoided specificcase histories, Hemans creates women on the edge of death in order, as GaryKelly says, “to bring about a future liberal state”,41 which, of course, wasWollstonecraft’s great hope as well. Lootens has observed that “these arefigures in extremis; they are heroines, but for Hemans they are also womenwhose sanity, and perhaps even humanity, is questionable” in their frenzy.42

Feldman comments, however, that: “Death, as Hemans sees it, may be at timesa woman’s most forceful adversary but can also be her salvation”.43

Hemans gives us a young woman who is far better empowered in “TheAmerican Forest Girl” (1826), where a Native American maiden very differentfrom the one in the death canoe is strangely able to persuade her tribal eldersto spare the life of a “fair-hair’d youth of England” (Hemans, Records 69, line 6),whom they have tied to the stake and are about to burn alive. For Hemans,as with the unexplained release of the Protestant conquistador in The ForestSanctuary, this must have been the recording of a utopian dream. Nevertheless,she gives the forest girl a power she denied to Elmina and which Hemansherself could only wield in her poetry. The intercultural resolution here, asMellor has argued,44 shows Hemans’s determination to promote the idea ofharmony beyond national or ethnic borders; there is no hint of romance here,but both of the “young strangers”—the dark Indian forest girl and the paleEnglish boy—are now free to imagine a different kind of world from the oneHemans found herself stuck in. And the idea that such freedoms were morelikely to be found and nurtured in the New World is one which we havealready seen Hemans take up in The Forest Sanctuary. But, in the dreadfulmeantime, the child sacrifice she portrayed in The Siege of Valencia and


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“Casabianca” would continue, and many Englishwomen of her generation wouldlive a life-in-death—zombies of the patriarchy.

Notes

1 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993) 107;Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise ofWomen’s Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1989).

2 George Gilfillan, “Mrs. Hemans,” Modern Literature and Literary Men: Being aGallery of Literary Portraits (New York: D. Appleton, 1850) 238; qtd. in TriciaLootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization(Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1996) 67.

3 Donelle Ruwe, “The Canon-Maker: Felicia Hemans and Torquato Tasso’sSister,” Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity, ed. Larry H. Peerand Diane Long Hoeveler (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998) 133–57;Tricia Lootens, “Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine ‘InternalEnemies,’ and the Domestication of National Identity,” PMLA 109.2 (1994):238–53; Julie Melnyk, “Hemans’s Later Poetry: Religion and the VaticPoet,” Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, ed. NanoraSweet and Julie Melnyk (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) 74–92.

4 Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘Certainly Not a Female Pen’: Felicia Hemans’sEarly Public Reception,” Sweet and Melnyk 95–114; Chad Edgar, “FeliciaHemans and the Shifting Field of Romanticism,” Sweet and Melnyk 124–34;Paula R. Feldman, “The Poet and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and theLiterary Marketplace,” Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Genderand Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (London:Macmillan, 1999) 71–101; William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in theRomantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004).

5 David E. Latané, Jr., “Who Counts? Popularity, Modern Recovery, and theEarly Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet,” Teaching British Women Writers1750–1900, ed. Jeanne Moskal and Shannon R. Wooden (New York: Lang,2005) 205–23.

6 Susan J. Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006) 47.

7 Stephen C. Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009); Paula R. Feldman, introduction andnotes, Records of Woman, with Other Poems, by Felicia Hemans (Lexington: UPof Kentucky, 1999) xi–xxix; Anthony John Harding, “Felicia Hemans andthe Effacement of Woman,” Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices,ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, NH: UP of NewEngland, 1995) 138–49; Gary Kelly, “Death and the Matron: FeliciaHemans, Romantic Death, and the Founding of the Modern Liberal State,”Sweet and Melnyk 196–211; Gary Kelly, introduction, Felicia Hemans:


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Selected Poems, Prose, and Letters (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002) 15–85(esp. 33–45); Jerome J. McGann, “Literary History, Romanticism, andFelicia Hemans,” Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837,ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: U of PennsylvaniaP, 1994) 210–27; Susan J. Wolfson, “‘Domestic Affections’ and ‘The Spearof Minerva’: Felicia Hemans and the Dilemma of Gender,” Shiner Wilsonand Haefner 128–66; Susan J. Wolfson, “Felicia Hemans and the RevolvingDoors of Perception,” Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors ofPerception, ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (Lexington:UP of Kentucky, 1999) 214–41.

8 Qtd. in Feldman, “The Poet” 87.9 See Wolfson, “‘Domestic Affections’” 133.

10 Joselyn M. Almeida, ed., Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).

11 Harriett Hughes, The Works of Mrs. Hemans, with a Memoir of Her Life by HerSister, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: Thomas Cadell,1839) 81; qtd. in Susan J. Wolfson, ed., Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters,Reception Materials (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) 268.

12 Wolfson, Borderlines 47.13 Wolfson, “Revolving Doors.”14 Henry F. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans, with Illustrations of Her Literary

Character from Her Private Correspondence, 2 vols. (New York: Saunders andOtley, 1836) 1: 111; qtd. in Wolfson, “Revolving Doors” 229.

15 Lootens, “Hemans and Home” 242–43.16 Wolfson, Felicia Hemans 173.17 Wolfson, Felicia Hemans 175, lines 104–05. Subsequent quotations from

Hemans’s work are from Wolfson’s edition, unless otherwise indicated. Thereferences are given in parentheses in the text.

18 John-David Lopez, “Recovered Voices: The Sources of The Siege of Valencia,”European Romantic Review 17.1 (2006): 69–87 (71).

19 Jeffrey Cass, “Fighting Over the Woman’s Body: Representations of Spainand the Staging of Gender,” Almeida 233–48 (235).

20 Wolfson Felicia Hemans 178.21 Felicia Hemans, Records of Woman, with Other Poems, ed. Paula R. Feldman

(Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999) 61, line 65. Subsequent references aregiven in parentheses in the text.

22 Wolfson, “Revolving Doors” 225.23 Nanora Sweet, “The Forest Sanctuary: The Anglo-Hispanic Uncanny in Felicia

Hemans and José Maria Blanco White,” Almeida 159–82 (163).24 Wolfson, “‘Domestic Affections’” 155.25 Mellor 140, 141.26 Ross 276, 275, 292.27 Harding 145, 146.28 Kelly, “Death” 207, 209.


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29 Sweet 159, 175.30 Isobel Armstrong, “The Gush of the Feminine: How Can We Read Women’s

Poetry of the Romantic Period?” Feldman and Kelley 13–32 (32); CatherineRobson, “Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History,”PMLA 120.1 (2005): 148–62 (149).

31 Wolfson, Borderlines 50.32 Wolfson, “‘Domestic Affections’” 145–55 esp. 145ff.; Kelly, “Death.”33 Lootens, “Hemans and Home” 241.34 In another short poem published in 1827, a year after “Casabianca”—“Ivan

the Czar” (Hemans, Records 94–97)—she presents a variation on the theme.Ivan is so insulted by his nobles’ suggestion that his son protect him in battle—more specifically, by the implication that he is no longer strong enough toprotect himself—that he fatally injures the youth in his fury and then ishorrified at what he has done. Unlike “Casabianca”, where both son andfather perish in the shipboard fire, Ivan here lives on, cursed with the tragicresult of his hubris and clearly doomed to die soon after.

35 See McGann 227n for the date; Hemans, Records 187.36 Faber Popular Reciter 15; rpt. in McGann 218.37 McGann 222, 223, 226.38 Records 89.39 Mellor 126.40 Wolfson, Borderlines 62.41 Kelly, introduction 28.42 Lootens, “Hemans and Home” 243.43 Feldman, introduction xxi.44 Anne K. Mellor, “Embodied Cosmopolitanism and the British Romantic

Woman Writer,” European Romantic Review 17.3 (2006): 289–300 (294).

James Holt McGavran, Jr. has taught at the University of North Carolina atCharlotte, USA, since 1973. He has published three edited collections—Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Universityof Georgia Press, 1991; reprinted in 2009), Literature and the Child: RomanticContinuations, Postmodern Contestations (University of Iowa Press, 1999) andTime of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood(University of Iowa Press, 2012)—as well as a memoir, In the Shadow of the Bear(Michigan State University Press, 2010), and numerous articles on Romantic-eratexts and children’s literature. He was his campus’s recipient of the Bank ofAmerica Award for Teaching Excellence in 2006 and the 2007 University of NorthCarolina Board of Governors’ Award for Excellence in Teaching. Address:Department of English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 UniversityCity Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223-0001, USA. [email: [email protected]]


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mailto:[email protected]

felicia hemans's feminist poetry of the mid 1820s

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