Notes
1. Ozymandias (1818), ll. 12-14.
2. On
Seeing the Elgin Marbles (1817), ll. 9-14.
3. This
argument is convincingly posed by Anne Janowitz in
England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National
Landscape (1990).
4. This is
Laurence Goldstein's argument in Ruins and Empire: The
Evolution of a Theme in Augustan Romantic Literature
(1977).
5. The
conversation on Romantic ruins and fragments has had
several notable episodes. Paul de Man's classic study of
Shelley's Triumph of Life, “Shelley
Disfigured” (1984), argues that we must resist the
urge to seek semantic closure for the fragment poem through
its “monumentalization” as historical or
aesthetic object, a process that he claims arbitrarily
settles meaning within a pre-determined historical or
semantic order (121). In Thomas McFarland's Romanticism
and the Forms of Ruin, the fragmentary is instead
elevated to a cultural theme. In this
expressivist-essentialist model, Romanticism is the
emblematic expression of a phenomenological reality
characterized by the “diasparactive” triad of
incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin (5-7). This
reality, which is not necessarily mediated by social and
political history, manifests in Romantic literature as the
expression of longing and melancholy that terminate in a
“sentiment des ruines” (15). Marjorie
Levinson's The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a
Form (1986) disputes this claim and argues instead for
a historically nuanced reading of the fragment poem that
disentangles the history of its composition, publication,
and reception from the signification produced by the early
nineteenth-century literary milieu and the legacy of
Romantic ideology influencing modern critical discourse
(8). Methodologically, this study most closely resembles
Levinson's in its attention to historical facts and
ideological determination. Yet it is not, per se, a study
of the fragment as phenomenon or form.
6. See
also Nairn's Break-Up of Britain (1977) and
After Britain (2000), Samuel's three-volume
collection Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of
British Identity (late 1980s), Hitchens's The
Abolition of Britain (1999), and Marr's BBC
documentary and book The Day Britain Died (2000).
For an excellent review of this literature, see also Stuart
Ward's “The End of Empire and the Fate of
Britishness” (2004).
7. This,
indeed, is the subject of Suvir Kual's Poems of Nation,
Anthems of Empire (2000): 'Rule, Britannia!' . . . is
testimonial to the fact that poets in the long eighteenth
century imagined poetry to be a unique and privileged
literary form for the enunciation of a puissant (and
plastic) vocabulary of nation, particularly one appropriate
to a Britain proving itself . . . great at home and
abroad” (5).
8. Shaftesbury's Characteristicks (1714)
is very much a recapitulation of the classical argument for
Christian morality espoused by landed Tory aristocrats over
and against an emergent bourgeois culture that emphasized
the ameliorating effects of personal industry and commerce,
despite being driven by self-interest and monetary reward.
In many respects, Mandeville, a Dutch native raised in a
commercial society where the state facilitated commercial
and colonial expansion, is the mouthpiece for bourgeois
cultural transvaluation against an established hegemonic
aristocratic culture whose values and sensibility are
rooted in the classical doctrine of “virtu,”
which is based on the ownership of land and feudal social
relations. J.G.A. Pocock's “The Mobility of Property
and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology” (1985)
provides an excellent study of this tension.
9. Both
arguments flow from Giambattista Vico's argument that
destructive passions can be harnessed for the public
good.
10. The
term comes from John Brewer's The Sinews of Power: War,
Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (1989).
11. “It was thus,” continues Hume in
Of Simplicity and Refinement, “the ASIATIC
eloquence degenerated so much from the ATTIC: It was thus
the age of CLAUDIUS and NERO became so much inferior to
that of AUGUSTUS in taste and genius: And perhaps there
are, at present, some symptoms of a like degeneracy of
taste, in FRANCE as well as in ENGLAND” (Essays
Moral Political and Literary 196). Cultural
refinement, swelled with age and imperial growth, leads to
decadence and degeneracy, following the cyclical pattern of
rise and decline.
12. In
1781, after completing the first part of his narrative on
the fall of the Western Roman empire and before embarking
on the second part concerning the fall of the Eastern Roman
empire, Gibbon wrote his General Observations on the
Fall of the Roman Empire in the West, an essay which
was appended to the end of Chapter 38 of The
Decline. In it, he writes, “The decline of Rome
was the natural and inevitable result of immoderate
greatness. Prosperity ripened the principles of decay; the
causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of
conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the
artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the
pressure of its own weight” (IV.XXXVIII.119).
13. Contra Smith, Malthus argues that “the
increasing wealth of the nation has had little or no
tendency to better the condition of the labouring
poor” (An Essay on the Principle of
Population XVI.112). Indeed, he suggests that the
opposite may more likely be true.
14. See
also Colley's chapter on “Womanpower”
(237-81).
15. Kate
Davies convincingly argues that female involvement in the
early abolition movement strengthened it because of its
presumed non-political character. Females were attracted to
the movement because of the delicacy of “feminine
sympathy” toward the suffering of slaves, which
tinctured the abolitionist movement with a moral imperative
ratified by the purported moral authority invested in
females. See also “A Moral Purchase; Femininity,
Commerce, and Abolition, 1788-1792” (2001).
16. See
also Mellor's “The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two
Traditions of British Women's Poetry, 1780-1830”
(1997).
17. In
“Configurations of Feminine Reform: The Woman Writer
and the Tradition of Dissent” (1994), Marlon Ross
argues that for Romantic women writers the act of writing,
and furthermore of writing on behalf of liberal reform
initiatives, constituted a “double dissension”
that could be mitigated by generic manipulation of two
sorts: either disguise women's political speech in
acceptably feminine modes like the conduct manual or
feminize conventional political modes (94).
18. In
“Consuming women: The Life of the ‘Literary
Lady” as Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century
England” (1993), Paula McDowell elaborates the
argument that iconic images of femininity circulated
alongside female texts in eighteenth-century print culture
and lent them a unique marketing edge that also placed
heavy constraints upon the public image of female authors.
This is because readers consumed female texts as much for
the commodified images of femininity associated with the
author as for content of the texts themselves.
19. See
also Tricia Lootens's “Hemans and her American Heirs:
Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry and National
Identity” (1999) for a discussion of Hemans's
American reception as a trans-atlantic patriotic poet.
20. With
the exception of Scott and Byron, Hemans generated more
revenue by the sale of the multiple editions of her works
than any other Romantic contemporary. Paula R. Feldman
documents this phenomenon in “The Poet and the
Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace”
(1999).
21. The Edinburgh Monthly Review 3 (April
1820): 373-83, cited in Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems,
Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan J. Wolfson,
531.
22. The Edinburgh Review 50 (October 1829):
32-47, cited in Wolfson 551.
23. In
Ambitious Heights (1990), Norma Clarke reveals
that “the poet of domesticity, of hearth and home,
had skeletons rattling by the fireside,” including a
husband's desertion and the abandoning of her children's
welfare to her mother, sister, and brother's good will
(45-8).
24. Susan Wolfson, in “'Domestic Affections'
and ‘the spear of Minerva': Felicia Hemans and the
Dilemma of Gender” (1994), has argued that Hemans
deeply deplored the prescriptions of femininity that
consigned her to a life of shattered domesticity after her
husband's departure, and constrained her to write behind a
domestic mask out of the economic necessity of providing
for her family. She manages this situation by casting an
array of female characters in her poetry that reflect the
suffering endured by women as a result of their
sequestration and subjection to losses inflicted by the
masculine world of politics and war. As compensation, many
of her characters model an almost stoical degree of heroism
in the face of insurmountable suffering. Hence, her
patriotic stance may well be an adaptation to the
deplorable fate of women in a male-dominated society where
the tranquility of domestic space is constantly imperiled
by political intrigue and warfare.
25. See
the Letter to John Murray (26 February, 1817),
cited in Wolfson 480-1. These marbles—scavenged from
the ruins of the Parthenon and imported to London by Lord
Elgin in 1804, and eventually sold to the British
government in 1816—are featured in Keats's
self-reflexive poem, On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
(1817). But they were also the subject of a popular furor
over their rightful ownership involving Byron when he, in
Part II of Childe Harold (1812), explicitly
deplores their theft. Interestingly, contemporary reviewers
believed Modern Greece to have been written by
Byron despite the fact that the poem clearly weighs-in in
favor of this expropriation of Grecian art. See the review
of Modern Greece in The New British Ladies
Magazine n.s. 1 (1817): 70. See also Susan Wolfson's
study of Heman's relationship with Byron and his poetry in
“Hemans and the Romance of Byron” (2001).
26. We
know from Chorley that Volney was also quite influential on
the young poet Hemans. He cites a correspondence from
Bishop Heber that reveals Hemans's abandoned plan for a
syncretistic poem along the lines of Volney's
Ruins, in which her design was “to trace out
the symbolical meaning, by which the popular faiths of
every land are linked together” (I.46-7). One can
infer from Daniel White's “'Mysterious Sanctity':
Sectarianism and Syncretism from Volney to Hemans”
that Hemans most likely did eventually complete her
syncretistic and pietistic poem under the title of
Superstition and Revelation, a twenty-eight stanza
poem that argues for the universality of Christianity as
the root of all other creeds, which are revealed to be
superstitious adulterations of Christian revelation.
27. See
The British Review and London Critical Journal 15
(June 1820): 299-310, cited in Wolfson 532.
28. The
erudition of these notes led one early reviewer to believe
that the anonymous poem could not have been the production
of a “female pen” and must surely have been the
work of a presumably male “academical pen.” See
The British Review and London Critical Journal 15
(June 1820): 299-310, cited in Wolfson 532.
29. Trinder posits that Gibbon was the inspiration
behind Hemans's Alaric in Italy (24-5).
30. Hemans is here operating within the mode of
modern orientalism. As Said has explicated, the modern
orientalist performs a vital function for imperialism by
discursively mastering and dominating those peoples and
regions under its scrutiny. According to Said, the practice
of “discovering” the East operates within a
modern paradigm of orientalism that figures the East as
backwards and essentially knowable because it occupies a
past stage in Western development. Said explains that this
paradigm is contrary to classical orientalism, which
figures the East as exotic, essentially different from the
West, and therefore inscrutable (Orientalism
120-3). Byron's treatment of Greece and the Levant in
Childe Harold adheres closer to the latter
mode.
31. In a
letter to John Murray dated 4 September 1917, Byron,
bristled by this wordplay, indignantly retorts,
“Besides, why ‘modern?' You may say
modern Greeks, but surely Greece itself
is rather more ancient than ever it was” (cited in
Wolfson 536; his emphasis).
32. Saree Makdisi makes a similar argument for
Shelley's description of the East in Alastor,
where he discursively depopulates and reduces to ruins the
entirety of Eastern territories in order to enable a
reframing of the East as pre-modern space situation within
a historical continuum that leads teleologically to Western
European civilization. See also his Romantic
Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of
Modernity (1998) for a more advanced elaboration of
this argument.
33. This
difference can perhaps help to explain why Byron spoke so
fervently in behalf of Greek nationalism while Hemans
preferred to subject Greek society to the tutelage of a
more “civilized” British empire.
34. See
also Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation. Pratt offers Mungo Park's
Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa as a
text that exemplifies the central traits of a
“sentimental narrator.” The “sentimental
narrator” is defined as experiential, innocent,
passive, and imperiled by natives, thereby deflecting any
claim to imperial ambitions, when, in fact, this narrator
is performing the necessary task of collecting data on
unexplored territories. The narrator also inverts imperial
reality by presenting soon-to-be conquered natives as
dangerous aggressors while depicting the imperialist West
as fundamentally benign, inquisitive, and innocent.
35. Ward
contends that sameness, not alterity, is the primary force
that consolidated a cohesive British identity by
psychologically binding Britain with its white settler
communities across the globe (245). Accepting this, their
globally scattered graves also work to engrave a British
presence upon disparate and far-flung regions of the globe,
symbolically annexing these territories to a British
Commonwealth.
36. See
the Letter to John Murray (26 February, 1817),
cited in Wolfson 480-1.
37. See
Byron's Letter to John Murray (4 September 1817),
cited in Wolfson 536.
38. Sophia Psarra promulgates this argument in
“The Parthenon and the Erechtheion: The Architectural
Formation of Place, Politics, and Myth.” Her study
focuses on two adjacent structures that stand upon the
Acropolis: the Parthenon and the Erechtheion. The former
roots present imperial exploits in the nation's past,
thereby granting it legitimacy, while the latter anchors an
ancient religion and mythology in the present, granting
continuity to the nation's culture.
39. Sarah Suleri's The Rhetoric of English
India (1992) and Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of
Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India
(1989) pursue this theme at length.
40. Here, Hemans takes up the cause of the native
arts movement, following in the footsteps of Blake,
Wordsworth, and numerous other British poets and painters.
For more on this, see also Morris Eaves's The
Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of
Blake (1992).
41. In
“Minerva's Veil: Hemans, Critics, and the
Construction of Gender” (1997), Eubanks suggests that
the figure of Minerva, the warrior goddess, which is
central to Hemans's description of the Greek national
mythology, is a symbolic affront to the doctrine of
separate spheres (345).
top of page
|
