forging connections: women's poetry from the renaissance to romanticism || mothers and...

Mothers and Daughters: Poetic Generation(s) in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth CenturiesAuthor(s): Stuart CurranSource: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 4, Forging Connections: Women's Poetryfrom the Renaissance to Romanticism (2000), pp. 575-590Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817617 .

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Mothers and Daughters: Poetic Generation(s) in the Eighteenth

and Nineteenth Centuries

STUART CURRAN

Tr his essay continues a lengthy personal meditation on the sources of inspiration for women as literary artists in the later eighteenth century.' For this purpose I have tended to concentrate on poetry, because its being

a preserve mostly of male writers in previous generations made it a natural arena for women seeking to define themselves as artists rather than as purveyors of mere commodities of print such as triple-decker novels. For the educated, gen- teel young woman of the Enlightenment, even when brought up within a restrictive code of behavior, poetry had become an approved mode of self- expression and, like sketching or needlework, it served to demonstrate the "ac- complishment" that was the customary goal of female education. But like those other modes of what women called their "work," and perhaps even more so, poetry also had the capacity to transcend the limitations of the domestic enclosure, allowing its practitioner a sense of her self-worth as an individual creator as well as a shared ethos with others pursuing similar paths both in and beyond the domestic circle.

There were a good many skeptics in the age who wondered about the ulti- mate value of what was pejoratively characterized as ladies' scribbling, as today, from an opposite perspective, we might see in this practice an invidious mode of patriarchal social control wherein, to adapt Shelley's phrasing, the "nightingale ... sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude"2 rather than breaking free of the gilded cage. But dismissiveness of that sort is rather a trap. To adapt to

1. As examples, see "Romantic Women Poets: Inscribing the Self," in Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, eds., Womens Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making ofa Canon, 1730-1820 (London and New York, 1999), 145-66; and, a companion to the present essay, "Dynamics of Female Friendship in the Later Eighteenth Century," in Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23 (2001), a special issue edited by Rick Incorvati.

2. This is a much maligned description of the inspired bard often lifted without a sense of context from Shelley's "Defence of Poetry," a conception not at all in accord with his focus in that discourse on the central social role of poets. For the source of the quotation, consult Shelleys Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York, 1977), 486.

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modern circumstances another writer who little thought his phrasing so apt, Richard Hurd, one might aver, "What we have gotten by this revolution, you will

say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling."3 The danger of retrospective cynicism over the value of the fable is that it has no

respect for the individual case, the young accomplished woman determined to make something out of herself and her limited sphere. It may be, indeed, that there is likewise little respect for the plural case, for the eighteenth century was

replete with women's support groups, whether on the formal level of the Blue-

stocking salons or on the more mundane level of women family members, all of them intent on broadening that sphere.

I quoted two respectable male literary arbiters in that opening paragraph somewhat by design, to remind us how easily we fall into such a pattern of discourse, how conditioned to it we are by our normative modes of education. In an ideal universe distinctions of gender in citation ought not, perhaps, to matter. But they still do, and even greatly so, because we have yet truly to recover the

history of what it was like for early modern women to conceive themselves as writers. Because of that fact, which must make us uncertain of the categories in which we place the subjects of our study as well as the norms to which they themselves looked to structure their identities, it seems to me utterly premature for us to attempt to define an alternative canon of women poets or even to have the ar-

rogance to confer canonicity itself. Rather, the instability and contingency of the context in which we must work ought to remind us how arbitrary is the very notion of canonicity on which so much of our conceptual structuring relies.

What matters fundamentally are the perhaps unconscious preconceptions brought to the literary endeavor based on the gender of the writer. The men whom we take for granted in our citations themselves took a gendered self-con-

ception for granted as a right to power. Women could not. When Byron begins Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by calling upon the muse he invokes as "form'd or fa- bled at the minstrel's will" or, more succinctly, opens Don Juan, Canto 3, with the

witty "Hail, muse, etc.," he is practicing a deflating but decidedly gendered, un- consciously masculinized poetic. The woman who calls upon her muse, as dozens

upon dozens of contemporary examples would serve to show, is highly conscious that she is appealing for a woman's collaboration in the creative act. Sometimes it is a close friend who encourages her; sometimes a sister; sometimes a mother. Those designations could, of course, be read figuratively. But for many a woman

poet they were expressly literal, for the individual creative act was centered in- which is to say both encouraged and constrained by-a familial context.

3. These are concluding phrases of Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London, 1762).

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POETIC GENERATION(S) IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES

Collaboration in the creative act is, certainly, not confined to women, as the amount of ink spilled over the bicentennial of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads should remind us. But to pursue this argument by contextualizing that volume may help to place the experience of women as poets in perspective. First of all, so accus- tomed are we to the honorific fame of Lyrical Ballads that we seldom think of the oddity of such a volume as being published by two men collaborating anonymously. Such a collaboration is actually something of a political signal, as recent new historicist scholarship has begun to reveal. Almost all of Coleridge's poetry of the 179os, for instance, was published in a collaborative form, whether with Robert Southey or Charles Lamb or Charles Lloyd. In 1799 Southey began an Annual Anthology through which he and his like-minded friends could group their poems, and Coleridge's later periodical The Friend continued the practice. Such collective discourse reveals a coterie aesthetic, one that had developed among the literati of Dissenting culture in the previous two decades. The Aikin family, for instance, had turned family collaboration into something approach- ing a literary subgenre, especially in the series of Evenings at Home produced by Anna Barbauld and her brother John Aikin. But their model is actually distinctly different from what was practiced in the Coleridge group, and, in turning to it as a pattern for familial collaboration and inspiration, I want to underscore the nature of the difference. Whatever Coleridge's conscious ideals, he was a com- pulsively competitive person who had a habit of assimilating his friends into the designs of his life. In this he found his peer, and maybe his better, in Wordsworth, whose tinkerings with the position of Coleridge's contributions in the later edi- tions of Lyrical Ballads kept opening the barely healed wounds of his sense of comparative inadequacy. And with Southey standing as their equal, we confront a triumvirate whose backbiting was virtually worthy of ancient Rome. Southey barely waited until his two friends were out of the country before writing a scathing attack on their volume in the Critical Review, particularly inveighing against the absurd poetic mannerisms practiced by his erstwhile fellow utopian and now his brother-in-law in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Far different was the comportment of the enlightened Dissenters who saw their role as both collaborative and educative. The great historian, Italianist, and parliamentarian of Liverpool William Roscoe collaborated in 1820 with his two daughters, Mary Anne and Jane, to produce the volume of verse they called Poems for Youth, By a Family Circle. By the time it had entered a second edition Jane was emboldened to publish her own separate volume of Poems (1820), revealing a re- ligious interiority of conspicuous depth. A wider notion of family had been adopted ten years earlier by the young nonconformist publisher Josiah Conder

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in a volume of poems called The Associate Minstrels.4 Within its pages seven distinct voices were gathered, including those of Josiah's father Thomas (who near the end contributes a solitary "Farewell to the Muse"), his siblings, his future wife Joan Elizabeth Thomas, and the precocious sisters Ann and Jane Taylor, already famous as children's authors and themselves embedded in their own nonconformist family circle of notably cooperative and egalitarian creativity.5 Although the poems are generally light and occasional in nature and adolescent in their enthusiasms, the authors, who often write on similar themes, evidently saw themselves as participating in a form of higher communion: their combined poetic efforts form a "mystic Wreath by Friendship wound" (p. 11*), even to the point of partaking of a sacred numerology: "O thus may our Associate seven / Entwine on earth a Wreath for heaven!" (p. 14*). Those lines from Joan Elizabeth's "Reverie," in a separately paginated section ending the volume in its initial printing, were transferred to a prefatory position in the second edition, highlighting the production of verse among this youthful circle as mutually inspiring and aspiring.

The models I have noted here should be further elucidated. The "Associate Minstrels" are adolescents with a printing-press overseen by a distant but well- wishing patriarch. The associations go beyond the Conders' actual domestic household in London, drawing in the Taylor sisters from their own productive family circle in Colchester, Suffolk. The model of association thus has a sym- bolic extensiveness, much as does the notion of "conversation" in the poems that Coleridge and Wordsworth marked with that designation. In contrast to Thomas Conder, however, Roscoe would appear to be anything but detached in attend-

ing to the creative talents of his daughters. With his many connections in the

publishing world, he can see to it that his family's joint production is overseen by a major firm and that Jane's separate volume gets comparable treatment. This is a father with power, and he uses it to showcase the literary gifts of daughters in their early twenties. It is a most unusual situation, virtually unique-which must give us pause. (The only comparable situation of this period is the one en-

joyed by Mary Stockdale, the daughter of the London publisher John Stockdale, who faithfully published his daughter's numerous volumes of verse across two decades, between 1798 and 1818.)

4. The first edition of 1810 was a private publication printed by George Ellerton and Thomas Conder. The second edition of 1813 took the family associates public on a grand scale, with the London firm of Gale, Curtis, and Fenner sharing distribution with the major Edinburgh house of John Ballantyne.

. The Taylor family is a principal focus of the enlightening sociological study by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago, 1987).

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I noted earlier how seriously women poets of this period are likely to take the female muse. Perhaps this is because so many depended on female patronage. Dedication pages of this period frequently bear a resemblance to the peerage of a particular region, as titled women lend their patronage and presumably con- tribute funding crucial to the printing of volumes of verse. Women's names also frequently form a majority of those in the subscription lists securing the costs of publication. It is clear as well that a number of the brighter literary talents among women of the later eighteenth century-among them Anna Barbauld and Hannah More-owed their considerable success to the concerted atten- tions of Bluestocking networks who looked out for them and their works. But behind many a successful woman poet, it almost goes without saying, stands a mother, often herself a poet. The models just cited within the literary culture of Dissent bear a striking similarity to those operative between mother and daughter, suggestive of how derivative that literary culture was from this prior relationship-how deeply its pious ethos was infused with an ideology centered on a matriarchally based domesticity.

I want here to concentrate on several distinct ways in which women poets of the time represent the shaping influence of their mothers in their own verse. My first example is the fullest illustration of the dynamics of female poetic generation I have ever come across. It begins with an ambitious farmer's daughter known to the world as Miss Whateley, who in 1764, at the age of twenty-six, published a volume of Original Poems on Several Occasions with the Dodsley firm. Roger Lonsdale chronicles the three years it took to bring this publication to fruition, and the distinguished cast, from William Shenstone to Erasmus Darwin, who had a hand in it.6 That obscurity should be underscored, however, because it took another thirty years before the author, now known as Mrs. Darwall, would publish a second collection of Poems on Several Occasions, this time in two volumes.7 There is no carryover of verse in this second publication from the original collection. What gives it a truly distinctive cast is the interpolation of a final section of poems by

6. Roger Lonsdale, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An OxfordAnthology (Oxford and New York, 1989), 256-57. The fullest exposition on Mary Whateley Darwell has been provided by Ann Messenger in Gender at Work: Four Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century (Detroit, 1990). For a further documenta- tion of her career, see E. W. Pitcher, "Mary Whateley Darwall's Poem on 'Female Friendship,"' Notes and Queries, n.s., 45 (1998): 471-74.

7. Poems on Several Occasions, 2 vols. (Walsall: pr. F Milner; London: H. Lowndes, 1794). Presumably because of this publication's sharing the title of the earlier collection and seeming to be merely a reprint rather than the original collection it actually is, this work has slipped by the astute bibliographical re- searches ofJ. R. De J. Jackson in both Annals ofEnglish Verse, 177-1835 (New York, 1985) and Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770-1835 (Oxford, 1993).

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other hands, with the designation: "The following sonnets &c. marked with as- terisks were written by two young friends of the author." Their authorship is distinguished by the signatures of Y and Z, not allowing us any inference as to their actual identities. Lonsdale assumes that one of these is her daughter Elizabeth, an attribution with which I agree. I only wish to add that the other author would most likely have been her second sister. The evidence for this, which Lonsdale does not note, lies in the concluding section of Elizabeth Darwall's own verse publication, The Storm, with Other Poems, dating from sixteen years later, in 1810. Here, as before, at the end of the volume poems by other hands are interpolated, the first three of which are "Addressed to E. Darwall, by her sister," and these are followed by a retrospective portrait of the younger Darwall at her home in Wales: "Addressed to E. D. By her mother, who was first known to the poetical world as Miss Whateley." It contains this stanza:

Swift as the light-wing'd moments fly, Say, canst thou one, Eliza, spare,

To glad an absent sister's eye, Or parent's dimmed with age and care?

Yes - thy own heart my advocate will prove, For 'tis composed of gratitude and love.

(P. 153)

Thus, this poem reintroduces the absent sister, whether Y or Z, author of the previous three poems, the last of which was written to her own daughter: "To my little absent Mary," a poem presumably sent in a letter to the child, who is daughter and granddaughter and niece of poets-and, one assumes, herself to become one, too:

Oh! come my child! I long to hear Thy prattling tongue-thy warblings wild So thrilling sweet! that have beguil'd

Thy mother's eye of many a tear. (P. 149)

There is nothing at all pretentious, let alone arty, let alone publicly substantive, about this touching intertwining of women's lives through verse and over the period of half a century. The very naturalness by which the family circle, across three generations, is recomposed by poetry is the underlying, and clearly sym- bolic, point. The generation of daughters is synonymous with the generation of the verse by which they create and mirror a family likeness, an articulated communion, a community of affection.8

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From this model I turn to another-which is commemorative rather than collaborative-in a poem that is as moving in its utterance as in its conception: Margaret Holford the Younger's dedication of her volume of Poems of 1811 to her mother, also known as Margaret Holford, author of novels and a volume of verse, Gresford Vale; and Other Poems, published in 1798.9 Holford the Younger had already made her name two years earlier, in 1809, with Wallace; or the Fight at Falkirk, a Metrical Romance, a work whose domestic popularity ensured an Amer- ican piracy as well. She would clinch her popularity in 1816 with Margaret of Anjou (likewise pirated in Philadelphia), which is a truly distinguished epic romance. Wallace is dedicated to a close friend, Gertrude Louisa Allen, and one suspects that its success and Holford's self-conscious sense of having achieved a place in the contemporary literary pantheon were essential to her plan of dedi- cating this second volume comprised of lyric verse to her mother. Her mother, too, had celebrated the inspiration of female friendship in the loco-descriptive title poem of her collection, "Gresford Vale," which is "Inscribed to Mrs. Parry and Mrs. Ellen Warrington." These are friends of many years inhabiting a locale implicitly cast in the tradition of Anna Seward's "Llangollen Vale" of two years before, a retreat "Whence Sapphic strains diffuse, through later days, / The dulcet effluence of the Lesbian bays." That is to say, these local female friends have a like effect in their sequestered vale of Gresford to that associated with the celebrated figures of Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the ladies of Llangollen.

What is noteworthy in this context is how the mother's poetic tribute to the nurturing influence of women translates into her own, more intimate act of poetic nurturance, as the dedicatory epistle by her daughter articulates it. In the fable in which Margaret Holford the Younger casts her tribute, the true act of dedication has been undertaken by her mother, who, surveying the possible boons she might wish as a gift from the "natal Genius" for her infant child, seized at last on the only one that would ensure the daughter's complete fulfillment, which was to dedicate her from her youth to the poetic muse. The mature daughter's tribute to her mother-she was at this point thirty-three-is in kind: a volume of verse that replicates the mother's own volume-even at times strik- ingly, down to subject matter-and that extends the nurturing bond articulated

8. Earlier in the century one senses a similar form of mother-daughter bonding as Charlotte Brereton reprints two poems she had written on her mother's death, and originally published in the Gentleman's Magazine, in the prefatory material to the posthumous publication of Jane Hughes Brereton's Poems on Several Occasions (1744).

9. Both volumes of poems are available in typescript from the Brown University Women Writers Project and should be likewise available electronically in due course.

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in the previous century into a new one. The end is less the bonding of generations, as in the Whateley-Darwall model, than the full individuation of a poetic gift from mother to daughter, a gift given by the one and returned by the other in an act of reciprocal exchange. A further, perhaps obvious, but significant extension of this mode of interchange in the last stanza of Holford's dedication is worth accentuating.

Mother, how oft the lucre-loving sire Commits his offspring to ungenial skies, Sends him to burn beneath the tropic fire, And waste far off his native energies, To glad, with foreign gold, a parent's eyes!- And has thy child a thriftless wanderer stray'd, Bringing for thee no tributary prize? Lo! At thy feet, a varied garland laid, Of blossoms pluck'd for thee, from Fancy's flowery glade!

(Lines 56-64)

Sons are sent off to earn their fortune in the colonies, an imperialist exploitation that is also personally vitiating to the health and well-being of these sons, all to

prove their worth in the eyes of a collective patriarchy that replicates itself in a

continuing, sequential, filial denigration. By contrast, the daughter in her self- fulfillment creates rather than exploits, allying herself with the ever-renewing productiveness of nature rather than the usurious accumulation of factitious wealth. If, in the Whateley-Darwall dynamic, collaboration across and within

generations implicitly substitutes for the rivalries and competitive energies of the masculine literary marketplace, with the Holfords female nurturance, like virtue, is its own reward, the continuing exercise of a potentiating influence.

Further variations in the early nineteenth century on this notion of female em-

powerment extend and complicate its ramifications. The first is what we can dis- cern in the dedicatory sonnet attached by Mary Tighe to her major six-book

allegory Psyche; or, the Legend of Love, as it was called in its first, private edition of 1805. (The works subsequent fame came from posthumous reprintings be-

ginning in 1811.) The private focus of the original imprint is probably of moment to the dedication, enforcing its tone of intimate sincerity and extending its force among a limited circle of friends and associates: once again, one may sense

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here the purity of the Dissenting ethos emphasizing the conveyance of ideas among a like-minded, sympathetic audience. Psyche, derived from the Golden Ass of Apuleius, is probably the most elaborate allegory of its period, at least this side of the prophetic books of Blake. One need not subscribe to its thrust of self- abnegation to admire its versification and continual invention. But the works underlying thematics are clearly enunciated in the dedicatory sonnet and their source is sharply focused so as to affect the meaning of the entire work.

Sonnet, Addressed to My Mother

Oh, thou! Whose tender smile most partially Hath ever blessed thy child: to thee belong The graces which adorn my first wild song, If aught of grace it knows: nor thou deny Thine ever prompt attention to supply. But let me lead thy willing ear along, Where virtuous love still bids the strain prolong His innocent applause; since from thine eye The beams of love first charmed my infant breast, And from thy lip Affection's soothing voice That eloquence of tenderness expressed, Which still my grateful heart confessed divine: Oh! ever may its accents sweet rejoice The soul which loves to own whate'er it has is thine!

If the purpose of the ensuing elaborate allegory is to represent the lengthy school- ing by which the soul, Psyche, trains itself to the rigorous demands of an Eros that is anything but what Keats characteristically called "warm Love," and that the sev- enth line of the sonnet objectifies as "virtuous love," the example by which the author has been instructed is her physical as well as moral source, her mother. Psyche the poem, the artistic embodiment of the spiritual journey of its author, will in conception and execution "own whate'er it has is thine." Even the claims to art of this "first wild song" may be said to derive from "Affections soothing voice," the "eloquence of tenderness" by which the daughter was addressed from the first by her mother. That eloquence in turn breeds the "accents sweet" by which the daughter responds to the maternal nurturance-which is to say, this sonnet and, by extension, the major poem that follows it, even perhaps, further, an entire life and career. Eros, thus, is not at all the phallic authority within a fundamentally heterosexual union presupposed by the myth and by necessity elaborated in the long poem that follows. It is defined instead in terms of a mother's potentiating love. This disinterested, unsexualized, and unpossessive

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affection, in the sonnet's conception, by its very nature has provoked Mary Tighe's representation through allegory of the soul's response to, and aspiration for, a love that is ultimately supernal.

A final example of commemorative verse extends the daughter's response to her mother's shaping influence in an even more elaborate form. Felicia Hemans's "To my Mother," published when she was seventeen, is one of the handful of poems from her first two volumes of juvenile verse that she authorized to be reprinted in the later collected form of her oeuvre. Its lack of polished expression is obvious but may be forgiven in light of the utter excess of the tribute. Its hyperbolic praise may even be seen as wholly justified. With Felicia Browne and Felicia Browne Hemans we encounter a mother-daughter relationship of remarkable intensity, one that in its complexity is probably equaled by only one other in the age-like this one expressed by the complete confluence of the names-that between Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (which, though expressed in prose genres, is astonishing in its intensity and depth; and which I will turn to in conclusion). Felicity Browne the mother was born Wagner-originally pronounced, one can be all but certain, Vagner-the daughter of the German consul in Liverpool, and she gave her daughter a European education that included fluency in five modern languages. In a later age she would likely have been a stage mother: in this culture she produced a poet and, managing to have two full volumes of her juvenile verse published at the age of thirteen, set her on a career by which she outshone every poet of her age in pure popularity. William Michael Rossetti voices suspicion that the "affections of daughter and mother were more dominant and vivid in [her] than conjugal love,"'? which is a memorable understatement, and all commentators recognize that the death of her mother in 1827 was the signal crisis of the poet's life. It brought forth one direct treatment, the powerful "Hymn by the sick-bed of a mother," which inverts all the conventions of a hymn, being despondent rather than hopeful, solitary rather than communal, and disturbed rather than serene. It derives its authority and its setting from the sense of abandonment ex- perienced by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene, and the twice repeated imper- ative driving the hymn, "Hallow this grief," testifies to a moment of naked desperation that is a rare eruption out of Hemans's carefully controlled public voice. Whatever the emotional intensity of the daughter's attachment, there were probably ambivalences on her part at being so wholly shaped for a profession that no other woman had so fully undertaken before her. If here and there the shadows can be sensed, however, their substance is suppressed in an outpouring

lo. "Prefatory Notice," The Poetical Works ofMrs. Hemans (Philadelphia, 1881), 14.

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over many years of a psychological dependency that is all but overpowering. Margaret Holford brings her cultivated, private garden of verses in homage to her mother, but, as yet an adolescent, Felicia Hemans in "To My Mother" would re- turn the tribute of her fame:

And oh! If e'er I sigh'd to claim The palm, the living palm of Fame,

The glowing wreath of praise; If e'er I wish'd the glittering stores, That Fortune on her fav'rite pours; 'Twas but that wealth and fame, if mine, Round Thee, with streaming rays might shine,

And gild thy sun-bright days!

In characterizing her relationship with her mother, she reverts with remarkable

audacity in her last stanza to the ur-trope for Romantic creativity, figuring herself as an Aeolian lyre that will convert the agitated storm of her mother's future discomfort into "sweeter, milder sound." The daughter shaped by her mother's

aspiration for her perfection in art, in other words, will become, by the nature of this transformation, the involuntary instrument of artistic response to comfort her maternal source.

This is perhaps a troubling image, suggestive of a rootedness in maternal de-

pendency that abridges a sense of artistic, let alone human, integrity. And yet there is another way to construe the extremity of Hemans's representation of her mother's significance, and I offer it with some insistence not because I can prove it but because it testifies to how women enter upon an intertextuality that would be unlikely to occur within a male poetic universe. I come to this interpretation by way of a somewhat tortuous retrospect. The year after her mother's death Felicia Hemans published her most influential volume of poems, Records of Woman, a volume that, beyond its title and subject matter, also employs a dedication-to Joanna Baillie, Hemans's friend and sister poet-that denotes the sufficiency of a woman's experience and of its artistic rendering that are the subject and object of this volume. The last two poems in that sequence of female records crossing all cultures and epochs are "The Memorial Pillar" (commemorating the parting in 1616 of Ann, countess dowager of Pembroke, from her mother, Margaret, countess dowager of Cumberland, and projecting their reunion in heaven-surely a poem with personal relevance to the death of Hemans's mother) and the somber valedictory of "The Grave of a Poetess," her own tribute to Mary Tighe almost two decades after her death. That poem, too, in its weary, subdued timbres, has its resonance for the loss of her mother. Yet it would be all the more the case if, as I

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suspect, that initial tribute "To My Mother," published in 1812, had been written within the ambience of Mary Tighe's dedicatory sonnet, published the year earlier in a volume that attained immediate celebrity. It is hardly beyond the

range of acceptable interpretive speculation to infer that Margaret Holford's tribute to her mother, published the same year as Psyche, reveals the same impact. I offer this supposition as born of the curious association of figures and maternal tributes in all three poems but grounded in an important stipulation-that we can no more extract women from the particular traditions that infuse a woman's

poetic than we can ignore the conventions of genre, trope, and oratory that

through the assumptions of our training we naturally bring to our reading of

poems written by men. There may have been originally a sense of intimate sin-

cerity in the writing of Mary Tighe's sonnet, intended for a private printing, but

by the time it was republished as the production of a no-longer living but seem-

ingly classic poet, it became the literary property of all women, particularly of a woman like the young Felicia Dorothea Browne, who was already started on a career wherein she culled her subjects from every repository she could mine and whose dependence on a nurturing mother was, at the age of seventeen, a shaping fact of her emotional and artistic life.

The several examples I have cited in this inquiry share a larger characteristic than their affection for their mothers and their sense of a collaborative endeavor

connecting generations: it is their utter sincerity. Jane Taylor stands out as pos- sessing the sharpest sense of satiric irony of the women who had substantial ca- reers and an impact as poets during the Romantic age, which is why she so often reminds us of that great comic anatomizer Jane Austen. But the intense sense of inner conflict this occasioned can be read in the silences of the latter part of

Taylor's unfortunately foreshortened existence: satire was incompatible with her

evangelical sense of Christian piety and purpose. The poetry of women, though it readily concentrates on self-conflict and self-contradiction-the work of Felicia Hemans most of all-does not allow for much irony. Another way to say this is to acknowledge that throughout the eighteenth century, fiction by women is re-

plete with bad mothers, and among prominent examples in the Romantic age, outside of the oeuvre of Charlotte Smith, it is hard to point to any who are not so: instead, let us cite as examples that unprincipled marriage broker Mrs. Bennett, or the evil Marchesa Vivaldi of The Italian, or the libidinous mother who com-

petes with her daughter and has a large hand in her destruction in Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray; or, the Mother and Daughter of 1805. Thus, the examples I have cited from the poetry tell us something important about the status, the function, and the conception of poetry for women during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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The values of women writers do not necessarily change when we move into other genres, and the example of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who added Shelley to her name just as she published her first two works anonymously, can prove this point. Much has been made-and how can we not make much of it?-of the ter- rible psychological burden that Mary Shelley bore as the result of her mother's death of puerperal infection ten days after her birth. The speculation has been generally heaviest around Frankenstein, which to many-though, it should be stressed, on the basis of no direct evidence-reveals a conservative daughter re- vising downward her mother's radical demands in a supposedly complex act of either killing her for good or justifying her own independent existence.

As my closing example, I would like to outline an opposite case, one com- mensurate with the portrait we have of the young girl who haunted her mother's tomb, making it her private sanctuary and choosing it as the place to declare her love for P. B. Shelley and resolve on elopement with this already married man- a daughter who read and reread her mother's works during the years she shared with P. B. Shelley. I would like to suggest, indeed, that Mary Shelley's writings, at least before she returned from Italy in 1824, are similarly haunted by Mary Wollstonecraft's presence, and that this literary phenomenon gives us, altogether remarkably, a further model for the daughter's employment of her mother-not, as in my other examples, through collaboration or in commemoration, but, rather, as an assimilation, an incorporation, or (what that word might suggest and Frankenstein gives an essential point to) a reanimation.

This is a complex process, occurring over four works and almost a decade, and hence it requires us to read Mary Shelley's early work in terms of a continuous movement rather than in isolation-or worse and more typically, in igno- rance of its actual range. What begins with the generic re-creation of The History ofa Six Weeks' Tour is remodeled within a sociology and politics in Frankenstein, is reconstrued closer to the actual terms of the biography and psychologized in Matilda, and at last achieves its fullest dimension, assuming a powerful and un- compromising feminist agenda-not lessened by its tragic unattainability-in Valperga.

A number of commentators have noticed in passing the generic resemblance of Mary Shelley's first work to that of her mother, partly taken from the journal she kept during her elopement to the Continent with P. B. Shelley and her step- sister Claire Clairmont in 1814 and partly from her notes during the Swiss sum- mer of 1816. Particularly with the latter account, rendered in an epistolary format and coterminous with the inception of the epistolary Frankenstein, we can sense

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the imprint of her mother's most popular work, Letters written during a short res- idence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, published the year before her death. The epistolary format vies with her mother's Letters to offer a vivid present-tense narration, and there is a like combination of local characters and local history. What gives the History ofa Six Weeks' Tour its closest sense of identity with Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters, however, is its adoption of a characteristic, and often brilliant, ploy of the mother to subvert the gendered categories of eighteenth- century aesthetics and effect a continuous alternation between the sublime and the beautiful, often in the same paragraph. Swiss scenery, perhaps, gives Mary Shelley authority, as it had Helen Maria Williams a decade and a half before her, to undertake the sublime; but it is not the set pieces of Williams's A Tour in Switzerland (1798) we encounter here as much as the quick shifts in affect that Mary Wollstonecraft had so subtly crafted.

The same characteristics apply to the Alpine scenery of the second volume of Frankenstein, but in the novel the juxtaposition of opposite categories appears less a feature of style than it is of underlying conception, with the placid Genevan ambience of the Frankensteins, Clerval, and Elizabeth continually represented within the conventions of the beautiful, and the space occupied by the Creature, even if he wishes to hope otherwise, always associated with the dangerous and in- human sublime. Upon their meeting, the result is a collision of terms, with the two voices not conjoining but running in a parallel course-exactly as do the Arve, descending from Mt. Blanc, and the Rhone, issuing from Lake Geneva, for several miles after their point of confluence. This determined clash of per- spectives is not a prominent stylistic characteristic of either P. B. Shelley or William Godwin, at least up to this point, but seems instead to derive from Mary Shelley's continual meditation on her mother's skill in narrative technique.

There are three further aspects of the novel in which Mary Wollstonecraft's distinct impress can be felt. One is the very fact that the entire work is set in the far north, a masculine realm explored so vividly by her mother. A second, ana- lyzed in an article by Joyce Zonana," is the central (literally so) figure of Safie, who has a mind of her own, a determination to succeed, a willingness to travel in a man's world, and, like her mother, a strong aversion to Turkish conceptions of the demeaned role of women. Zonana is surely right that the centrality of this episode is a tribute to the centrality of Wollstonecraft in Mary Shelley's thinking. But we might wish to take the point a step further. Again, in the heavily inscribed critical context of this novel, I am not the first to hear in the Creature's narrative

11. Joyce Zonana, "They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale": Safie's Letters as the Feminist Core of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," Journal ofNarrative Technique 21 (Spring 1991): 170-84.

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the timbres ofJemima's life story in chapter 5 of Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman.' But it might be of real moment to combine the points just adduced, for of course it is at the absolute center of the Creature's narrative that we come upon Safie's account. In other words, whatever other incidental resonances we may feel of Wollstonecraft in Frankenstein, in its second and central volume (and for most readers its point of greatest narrative fascination) Mary Shelley can be observed adapting and doubling her obligation to Wollstonecraft's vision of the marginal- ized woman struggling to overcome the terms of a social construction as victim.

With the novella Matilda (the very title recalls the mother's two novels, Mary and Maria) Mary Wollstonecraft is evoked directly in the figure of the narrator's mother, Diana, who-this is the end of the first chapter-dies at the age of twenty-one "a few days after" giving birth.'3 She is described as deeply and thoughtfully read and, in turn, as educating her till-then frivolous husband in "the true ends of life." She convinces him to become "a distinguished member of society, a Patriot; and an enlightened lover of truth and virtue" (p. 179)- attributes, one would assume, that William Godwin possessed in abundance when he and Wollstonecraft became lovers. Why Diana is given this small cameo appearance in this enigmatic novella is a good question, like others we might pose about its features. But if we wish to read it as concerning the failure of otherwise enlightened characters to transcend social constructions that doom them to their destruction, then, at least in the mind of the author if not her readers, it would be useful to recall the acutely objective and penetrating eye Wollstonecraft cast upon such conventions.

That eye reappears as the vision of Euthanasia dei Adimari, countess of Valperga, in Mary Shelley's second novel (published in 1823), whose absence from modern publishing lists before 1997 is, one supposes, responsible for the virtually systematic distortion of Mary Shelley's feminism within a speculative criti- cism almost wholly centered on Frankenstein.'4 It is clear to me, in the present context, that in the character of Euthanasia Mary Shelley embodies an idealiza- tion of her mother as a political and moral leader ahead of her time, a figure who is eventually destroyed by a world dominated and thus defined by male power struggles but who will not compromise her ideals to that competitive and

12. See, for instance, Janet Todd, "Frankenstein's Daughter: Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft," Women and Literature 4 (1976): 18-27; and chapter 2 of Katherine Hill-Miller, "My Hideous Progeny" Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship (Newark, Del., 1995), 59-100.

13. I quote this text from The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York, 1990), 180.

14. I have adumbrated some of these features in the introduction to my edition of Valperga (New York, 1997), xii-xxiii.

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dehumanizing ethos. The inherited duchy of Valperga, surrounded by land that owes allegiance to Castruccio Castraccani, the consul of Lucca, offers a contrast to the government of warlords because it rests on the same maternal principles of humane sympathy, equality, and nurturance we witness as repeated features of poems centered on the mother's role in a daughter's education and maturation.

The postscript of Valperga, its final chapter, reverts to historical chronicles to recount Castruccio's last years, ending with his actual epitaph from the church of San Francesco in Lucca. With a wrenching force, Valperga thus confirms the les- son of the contrasting, female-centered fiction created by Mary Shelley's novel, re- minding us that the mother's power, like that of the putative Countess Euthanasia resurrected through these pages, can transcend time and mortality only through its inscription. The implication I draw in the context of the present argument is that the mother who died in bringing her daughter into the world, in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, left behind not a vac- uum but the present and continuing library of her writing to be ingested by her daughter as the means to her nurturance. The novel Valperga, then, becomes Mary Shelley's own contribution to the specular effects we have observed in the poetic tributes, truly a reaffirmation of her mother's ideals through a reanimation of her exemplary figure. In this way the novel is the culmination of Mary Shelley's early career, a generous repayment of her maternal heritage, and, to my mind, the richest tribute we find in the literature of the Romantic period to the mother's nurturing power.

University ofPennsylvania

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forging connections: women's poetry from the renaissance to romanticism || mothers and...

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