2 - The Gothic Poetess: Self-Confinement in the Sonnet Cell

Summary

“‘The sanctuary is prophaned,’ said Ellena, mildly, but with dignity: ‘it is become a prison.’”

Ann Radcliffe, The Italian

“Thus am I mine own prison.”

Christina Rossetti, “The Thread of Life”

Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), in addition to over six hundred pages of prose, is also, as its subtitle reminds us, “A Romance; interspersed with some pieces of poetry.” It contains sporadic verses passed off as poetic musings of the heroine Emily St. Aubert, who throughout the novel pens poems in moments of solitude, reflection, and often imprisonment. Emily composes mundane, occasional poems titled “Shipwreck,” “The Bat,” and “Go, pencil!” These poems, according to Samuel T. Coleridge in a 1794 review, were “some beautiful, all pleasing, but rather monotonous.” It is easy to disregard these poems as middling verses of escapist poetry. Subsumed by the prolific prose that surrounds them, they serve as signals of overwrought melancholia in scenes sometimes melodramatic to the point of satire. But the fact that Radcliffe’s Gothic heroines are also elegiac sonneteers allowed her novels to exert a poetic influence in ways that critics have not previously considered. By posing Gothic heroines as sometime-poetesses, Radcliffe’s astonishingly popular works established sentimental clichés that came to shape a succeeding generation of sonneteers, particularly women writers who inherited these Gothic conventions.

Romantic and Victorian poets recruited gendered tropes of imprisonment as a means for expressing the perversity of female domestic confinement: the state of being trapped within the “Bastille” of marriage or doomed to the risks of childbirth. Contorting their bodies and modifying their voices to negotiate the constraints of separate spheres, female poet-speakers evoked the language of captivity and thralldom, departing from the typically soft, harmonious lamentations of elegy. We hear, in their metasonnets, a new range of images and sounds emerge from women writers that mirror the constraints of their situation, establishing the Gothic voice of the professional Victorian poetess. This is a voice that sings and enacts, in myriad ways, a poetics of Gothic enclosure.

In this chapter, I argue that 1790s Gothic novels helped define the cultural image of the nineteenth-century poetess, contributing to the myth of the female sonneteer by modeling specifically Gothic modes of form and restraint, through embodied images of violence, fetishized confinement, and thwarted motherhood.