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"Edleston and I have separated for the present,"
Byron laments from Cambridge in a letter of 1806, "and
my mind is a chaos of hope and sorrow. . . . I
certainly love him more than any human being, and
neither time nor distance have had the least effect on
my (in general) changeable disposition. In short, we
shall put Lady E. Butler and Miss
Ponsonby to the blush, Pylades and
Orestes out of countenance, and want nothing
but a catastrophe like Nisus and
Euryalus, to give Jonathan and
David the 'go by'"(30).
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When Byron includes a pair of women in his
mythography of friendship, he marks a new moment in the
long history of same-sex bonds. By 1806 the public
image of friendship had undergone something of a sex
change, and Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the
so-called "Ladies of Llangollen" who eloped to Wales in
1778 and lived together until Butler's death in 1829,
became the first female emblem for the kind of
classical friendship that early modernists such as
Michel de Montaigne and Jeremy Taylor had resurrected
as an affair between men. As I have written elsewhere,
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries private
intimacies between women became public relations:
European gentlewomen appropriated the cultural capital
already attached to friendship between elite men as a
resource in their struggle for autonomy, authority, and
class privilege (Lanser 179-98). [1]
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Yet notice the asymmetry of Byron's tropes. He
doesn't speak of putting any of the male couples "to
the blush," but imagines irritating and besting them as
he flaunts his love for Edleston. Does the blush merely
echo the cultural commonplace that renders men
combative but women merely delicate? Do Butler and
Ponsonby blush only because Byron's love would best
theirs, or does the blush hint at something more than
friendship between Butler and Ponsonby, as was possibly
the case between Byron and Edleston? Whatever Byron's
logic, his gendered tropes underscore the limits of
imagining female-female relations within a male-male
lineage. For when two men choose one another,
patriarchy may be altered but is not overturned, but
when two women do so, structures of male dominance are
potentially compromised. As David Halperin reminds us,
in patriarchal systems "women must submit to a system
of compulsory heterosociality" in which "the dominating
feature" is "the inescapability of sexual relations
with men." Thus "sexual relations among women represent
a perennial threat to male dominance, especially
whenever such relations become exclusive and thereby
take women out of circulation among men" (Halperin
78).
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This threat is recognized in contemporary defenses
of Butler and Ponsonby. Mary Pilkington's Memoirs
of Celebrated Female Characters (1804), for
example, comments that "so completely gratified" were
Butler and Ponsonby "in the society of each other, that
they entertained the determination of never becoming
wives." But she acknowledges that their families
thought this decision "very unnatural" and that the two
women had to "def[y] the opinion of the world" in order
to "reside in the harmony of true friendship."
Pilkington then uses Butler and Ponsonby to refute the
assertion "that females are incapable of a permanent
attachment" and to argue that women cannot to be
"disqualified from feeling a passion which is
calculated to dignify the human mind" (Pilkington
64-5). Anna Seward's heroic poem Llangollen
Vale (1796) likewise recognizes Butler and
Ponsonby's "sacred Friendship" as having been
"assail[ed]" alike by "stern authorities" and "silken"
efforts at "persuasion" (5).
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These tributes to Butler and Ponsonby suggest that
Byron's blush might stand in for both delicacy
and defiance, characterizing exclusive female
coupling at once, and paradoxically, as an epitome of
virtue and a transgression of social and sexual norms.
This paradox may explain why, especially during the
last quarter of the century, an eruption of bawdy and
satiric texts coexisted uneasily with, and could
potentially undermine, idyllic representations of
female friendship that seemed to be their opposite.
Where friendship was a substitute rather than a
supplement for marriage, and thus a transgression of
the heterosexual order whether or not the relationship
was itself "sexual"—and who could know?—the
lines separating virtuous from transgressive alliances
were often literally paper thin: a public word could
make or break a reputation, especially after what
Katharine Binhammer has called the 'sex panic' of the
1790s when Marie Antoinette's putative sapphism helped
to pave her journey to the guillotine (409-35).
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It is this light that I want to explore the place of
women's erotic affiliations in the Romantic imagination
and the tensions around which they get configured in
Romantic verse. In the larger project from which I draw
this discussion, I argue that in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries female intimacies become a charged
site for working out the epistemic changes of
modernity. By the late eighteenth century, when Butler
and Ponsonby had themselves become a charged site, the
fragile lines separating chaste friendship from suspect
sapphism were heavily class-inflected, favoring
gentlewomen who did not transgress external codes of
propriety and femininity. In the end, though, the fine
lines of distinction depended on the words and images
that surrounded a particular relationship and on the
interpretive conventions through which these could be
read.[2]
As with Gestalt psychology's famous figure of the vase
that is also two faces in profile, or the "ingenue" who
can turn into a "hag," the alternative reading
lurks—and becomes startlingly obvious once the
figure-ground system is reversed though a perceptual
shift. On paper, Butler and Ponsonby were thus
variously celebrated (for the most part) and denigrated
(privately and sometimes publicly) for a way of life
that itself did not change: in 1790, for example, fully
twelve years after their elopement, a newspaper story
suddenly appeared mocking Butler as "masculine" and the
couple as odd and implying that they had something to
blush about. Not surprisingly, women like Butler and
Ponsonby and defenders like Pilkington and Seward also
took part in manipulating representations, in what
sometimes amounted to an elaborate public relations
scheme (Lanser 179-98).
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I want to suggest that the transgressive potential
of female friendship, with its tenuous distinction
between virtuous friendship and sexual sin, urged the
inscription of female intimacies into the ambiguities
of figuration and hence into poetic forms. One can
argue, of course, that in Romantic poetry all
sexuality is so figured, that—to cite Stuart
Curran—in Britain "there is little sex, seldom an
actual body, and virtually no romance in Romanticism"
("Of Genes"). But for two somewhat contrary reasons
Romantic writings may be especially important to the
history of female homoeroticism. First, it is arguably
the Romantic moment that spawned the modern
constructions of sexual subjectivity and the attendant
values of individual difference, self-fulfillment, the
fatedness of attraction and the primacy of desire that
have legitimated modern same-sex bonds. It is no
accident that Anne Lister (1791-1840), the first
Englishwoman known to have left explicit records of a
self-conscious, actively sexual, and firmly homoerotic
orientation, looked to Rousseau's Confessions
and Byron's poems for the self-authorization that
enabled her to see the love of women as her proper
state, the "straight" path that "nature seemed to have
set out" for her (qtd. in Liddington 182).
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Secondly and somewhat contrarily, however, female
intimacies may offer a limit case for Romantic sexual
ideology. It is a commonplace that many Romantic
writers were accused of libertine sexual beliefs and
practices, yet (or perhaps for that reason) as Richard
Sha has observed, a notion of Romantic transcendence,
along with Foucauldian sexual chronologies, have also
tended to erase sexuality from Romanticist scholarship
(Sha). Now that scholars have begun to restore
sexuality to Romanticism in the process of
historicizing "Romantic ideology," it becomes important
to investigate the specific contours of Romantic values
about sexual forms and alliances. Andrew Elfenbein's
Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual
Role gives the most fully articulated expression
of this new project when he suggests that "sexual
transgression" underwrites the genius of Romantic art
and that homoeroticism in particular became a way for
writers to mark their superiority.[3]
Elfenbein's study explores the association of sapphism
with genius in Anne Damer's life, in Anne Bannerman's
poetry, and in Coleridge's self-fashioning through
"Christabel." Here I want to ask what we can learn
about the place of sapphism in the Romantic imagination
by looking at poetic tropes—that is, at the uses
of language and form in "a sense other than that which
is proper" to them.[4]
If, as I implied above, poetic discourse is a fertile
site for transmuting suppressed content into symbolic
form and for inscribing the ambiguous, the
contradictory, the unspeakable, then it may hold a
significant place in the history of sexuality. Parsing
out the poetic contours of sapphism in Romantic poetry
could thus help us accomplish one piece of the history
of female homosexuality that, as David Halperin
recognizes in his "History of Male Homosexuality," must
be pursued separately in recognition of the enormous
difference patriarchy makes in the social construction
of same-sex bonds.
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As one contribution to such a project, I will focus
here on a loosely interconnected set of poems about the
nature and implications of female coupling. I'll begin
by revisiting "Christabel" (1816) and its exclusion
from the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads
(1800), where it was hastily supplanted by William
Wordsworth's "Michael." I'll then explore an implicit
contest about female intimacies carried out in poems by
two Wordsworths: an occasional sonnet published in 1827
that William composed while visiting Eleanor Butler and
Sarah Ponsonby during an 1824 tour of Wales with his
wife and daughter, and a longer work titled "Irregular
Verses" that Dorothy began in 1826 or 1827 for the
daughter of her beloved friend Jane Pollard but which
was not published until 1987. Finally, I will take up a
metrical figure present in "Christabel," "Irregular
Verses" and Percy Shelley's "Rosalind and Helen"
(1818), with a bow as well to Anne Lister's diaries.
Without arguing for direct influence, I want to read
these poems as an implicit Romantic conversation that
advances different models of sapphic sublimity in a
tropological contest about the nature and place of
female affinities.
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"Christabel" is, of course, the best known of these
poems and also the most openly sexual. Although the
encounter between Geraldine and Christabel is shrouded
in mystery, the poem makes clear as much through its
silences as through its images that something sapphic
happens in Christabel's bed that fateful night. Both
Geraldine and the scene of seduction are represented
primarily through metonymy and synechdoche: we know
Geraldine as a "faint and sweet" voice, as white
garments and a whiter neck, bright eyes, a "bosom" and
"half [a] side"; we know that both women undress and
become the objects of one another's gaze; that
Geraldine "had" her "will" with Christabel after a
psychic struggle with Christabel's "wandering mother";
that Geraldine's "spell" becomes "lord" of Christabel's
"utterance"; and that the "touch" of a "bosom" reveals
a "mark" of "shame" that creates a tightness "beneath
[Christabel's] heaving breasts." We know that
Christabel recognizes that she has "sinn'd," but
experiences only "perplexity of mind" about its
occasion. Of what passes in the bed we know only that
Geraldine held "the maiden in her arms" and "worked"
her "harms." The scene carries images of both pleasure
and danger: that it is "a sight to dream of not to
tell" suggests that sapphism, though unspeakable, may
also be desired.[5]
Herein lies the transformation into "forbidden mystery"
of which Elfenbein writes: in contrast to a text like
Henry Fielding's Female Husband (1746), which
makes sex between women only a matter "not fit to be
mentioned," "Christabel" transmutes sapphic silence
into the stuff of fantasy.
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Elfenbein has argued persuasively that "Christabel"
marks at once the culmination of eighteenth-century
anti-sapphic satiric discourse and a transmutation of
that discourse into a "lesbian sublime" (Elfenbein
177). But the fullness of this transmutation depends on
a reader's ability to suppress the satire, and thus the
referentiality, that underwrites the poem. Arguing that
"the poem is virtually immune to historical allegory of
the kind that has traditionally been associated with
lesbianism," Elfenbein dismisses Hazlitt's and
Wordsworth's readings of "Christabel" as
obscene—and indeed one anonymous reviewer called
the poem "the most obscene poem in the English
Language"—as lapses of judgment to which "more
discriminating readers" with a "finer aesthetic taste"
would not succumb (Elfenbein 188,177). I would suggest,
however, that literalized readings of "Christabel"
point to an inability less aesthetic than social, and
one encouraged by the poem's own recourse to the very
tropes it seeks also to transcend. What I find
transgressive about "Christabel" is the way in which it
treads upon the fine line of external appearance that
separates the gender-bending sapphist from the virtuous
friend. By figuring both Christabel and Geraldine as
beautifully feminine on the surface, the poem suggests
that "surpassingly fair" women of high birth—and
not only the potentially demonic Geraldine but the
innocent Christabel—might be harboring homoerotic
desires. When Coleridge makes Geraldine's body only
half visible, he exploits and arguably plays with old
fears that women who desired women were hermaphrodites,
and some of Coleridge's reviewers did imagine
Geraldine's hidden side as "terrible and disgusting"
and "all deformity."[6]
Moreover, in a perverse doubling, Geraldine seems to be
exploiting lesbianism in the service of a marriage plot
just as eighteenth-century "female husbands" were
accused of doing when they seduced innocent young women
with an aim toward marrying for wealth or rank. And at
least one reviewer did fret that Geraldine's seduction
of Christabel resembled "the spells of vicious example
in real life" (Condor 210).
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We may never know whether this anxiety about "real
life" figured in the oddly belated distress
"Christabel" created for one or both Wordsworths.
Coleridge had written the poem's first section in 1797
and completed Part II for the second (1800) edition of
Lyrical Ballads, for which it was to serve as
the concluding poem. As biographers have reported,
Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in her journal on October 4,
1800, after a visit in which Coleridge apparently read
the poem aloud, the subjectless sentence, "Exceedingly
delighted with the 2nd part of "Christabel." Coleridge
apparently read out the poem once more on October 5
and, says Dorothy, "we had increasing pleasure." Yet on
the third day, the journal states without elaboration:
"Determined not to print 'Christabel' with the LB"
(Wordsworth, Journals 24-5).
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Scholars have of course wondered why "Christabel"
was so "suddenly and inexplicably dropped," and John
Worthen has claimed that there is "very little evidence
and very few facts" to justify contentiously partisan
readings of this development (Eilenberg 4; Worthen 10).
Richard Matlak speculates that Wordsworth had begun to
recognize the need "to battle for his creative life
against the remarkable gifts of originality and
imitative prowess Coleridge possessed" (Matlak 82).
It's most probable that in the end "Christabel" seemed
too great a departure from the poetics of Lyrical
Ballads as a whole; William did write to his
publisher that the style of "Christabel" "was so
discordant from my own that it could not be printed
along with my poems with any propriety," though as
Susan Eilenberg points out, "Rime of the Ancient
Mariner" is surely discordant as well (qtd. in
Eilenberg 10). Taking "propriety" to signify both
decorum and property, Eilenberg argues that Wordsworth
rejected "Christabel" in a struggle against Coleridge
for literary ownership. Others have suggested that
Wordsworth may simply have chosen the path of prudence:
the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads had
already faced troubles, and when "Christabel" finally
was published, it did meet with several mocking and
scathing reviews. It's possible that the Wordsworths
were concerned too about Coleridge's failure to
complete the poem and did not think it could be printed
in its unfinished form.
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None of these plausible answers explains why
William's and/or Dorothy's negative reaction to the
poem was so sudden and belated, nor do we know whether
William or Dorothy led the charge. In any event, it is
tempting to see in this decision a re-enactment of
"Christabel" itself, with the Wordsworths belatedly
resisting a seduction that would have turned into a
malediction. If so, then belated concern about the
sexual tenor of the poem cannot be ruled out. Alaric
Alfred Watts reports his mother's description of a
visit with Wordsworth in 1824 or 1825 in which the
subject of "Christabel" came up; as she reports,
Wordsworth "'did not dissent from my expressions of
admiration of this poem, but rather discomposed me by
observing that it was an indelicate poem, a defect
which it had never suggested itself to me to associate
with it."[7]
Like the Janus-faced Gestalt portraits, "Christabel"
lends itself to partial screens.
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Whatever the Wordsworths' motives, the decision to
exclude "Christabel" certainly posed immediate
problems: the new edition of Lyrical Ballads
was already in press and Wordsworth had to order the
proofs destroyed. It was in this pressure for
composition that Wordsworth's "Michael" had its
genesis. I am not the first to suggest that "Michael"
carries on an internal dialogue with "Christabel."
Eilenberg has argued that "Michael" is "a work of
[conscious or unconscious] usurpation" that re-enacts
Wordsworth's anxiety about the "foreign" within his own
literary property but that, in reworking "Christabel,"
leaves in its "self-thwarting narrative structure" the
traces of Wordsworth's transgression against his friend
(Eilenberg 97). Building on Eilenberg's recognition
that "Michael" appropriates many concrete details of
"Christabel" ("oak tree, faithful dog, troubling dream,
and morally emblematic lamp," the alienation of
children from parents, an old friend's evil to which a
child is sacrificed), I want to suggest that "Michael"
also revises "Christabel's" constructions of gender and
sexuality to reinstate a socially safer emotional
economy (Eilenberg 98-9).
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I read "Michael" as at once a heterosexual pastoral
and a paean to male bonding, twin projects that, as Eve
Sedgwick famously demonstrated in Between Men,
are often mutually constitutive. If "Christabel" offers
us an unholy aristocratic alliance, "Michael" recreates
the poor but honest Holy Family of loving father,
loving mother, and beloved son. The poem makes a point
that Michael "had not passed his days in singleness. /
He had a Wife" (80-81), but she is not named until the
time of Luke's departure in line 254. Twenty years
Michael's junior (as Geraldine is presumably junior by
a generation to Sir Leoline), Isabel is without
question the least important family member, the one who
makes the homosocial bond of father and son materially
possible, the one who knows and keeps her place.
Michael is as much mother as father, doing "female
service" to the child and rocking his cradle "with a
woman's gentle hand," further subordinating the need
for the mother just as the pre-eminence of the
father-son bond subordinates the marital to the filial
relationship: Michael and Luke even become
"playmates."
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In substituting "Michael" for "Christabel," then,
Wordsworth restores the dignity of the paterfamilias
and privileges filial alliances between men over erotic
relations with women. If Geraldine is a dangerous
shape-shifter wreaking domestic havoc, Michael is a
safe one who reaps domestic bliss: he is at once
father, brother, and mother to his only son, yet he is
as upright as Geraldine is queer. When trouble enters,
it remains afar, and while the mountaintop cottage will
ultimately be destroyed, while Michael and Isabel live
it is incorruptible. Insofar as we can read "Michael"
as an instance of the sublime, its sublimity seems to
me to lie in the tragic demise of the humble
trinitarian family that had been elevated wholly by
virtue and industry to its high place.
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The project of substitution that erases "Christabel"
for "Michael" is also enacted in the sonnet to Butler
and Ponsonby that Wordsworth wrote in 1824. If
"Christabel" uncovers the possibility that sapphic
desire can overtake the daughters of noblemen, "To the
Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P.," seems bent on
re-covery. Titled to convey nothing so much as title
itself, the poem mutes sapphic desire through re-naming
and metaphor. Like "Michael," "To the Lady E.B. and the
Hon. Miss P." instantiates pastoral over gothic
sublimity, repeating what became a longstanding
difference of more than poetics between Coleridge and
Wordsworth. Where "Christabel" feigns silence yet tells
all in a poem left deliberately unfinished due to its
"subtle and difficult" idea, William's sonnet gives a
sense of fullness and closure, of an absence of
mystery, a translation of anything foreign into
ordinary Englishness (Coleridge, Specimins
114).[8]
At the same time, however, Wordsworth inscribes this
project of substitution into the sonnet itself, so that
the cover-up can be dis-covered quite readily.
To the
Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P.
Composed in
the Grounds of Plass Newidd, near Llangollen, 1824.
A Stream, to mingle with your favourite Dee,
Along the Vale of Meditation flows;
So styled by those fierce Britons, pleased to
see
In Nature's face the expression of repose;
Or haply there some pious hermit chose
To live and die, the peace of heaven his aim;
To whom the wild sequestered region owes,
At this late day, its sanctifying name.
Glyn Cafaillgaroch, in the Cambrian tongue,
In ours, the Vale of Friendship, let this spot
Be named; where, faithful to a low-roofed Cot,
On Deva's banks, ye have abode so long;
Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,
Even on this earth, above the reach of Time![9]
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"To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P." is sparing
in references to its addressees, who appear only twice,
and only as pronouns, before the thirteenth line. The
poem subordinates them to the landscape of Llangollen
Vale in which legend and literature had inscribed them,
yet the sonnet never names Llangollen itself. Instead,
an elaborate set of synechdoches ends up carrying so
attenuated a relationship to the women as to substitute
the place for the persons rather than evoking the
persons by the place. Instead of the "mingling" of
Butler and Ponsonby, we get the "mingling" of stream
and river; the women "favour" the river rather than one
another; they "have abode so long" not with each other
but "on Deva's banks"; and when their love is finally
proclaimed—twice over—in the closing
couplet—it arrives in the trope of sisterhood, a
trope arguably not devoid of erotic potential for a
Wordsworth, but hardly the marital partnership that
Butler and Ponsonby lived out. And they have been
faithful not to one another but to "a low-roofed Cot,"
an image that rather flattens the imposing enough
two-story home of whose improvements they were so
proud. (Arguably the "Cot" could also stand for their
shared bed, a place, like the vale itself, not of
excitement but of "repose," its low roof a signifier of
the phallic lack.) Eventually—in the sonnet's
last couplet—the love does rise—or rather,
more laboriously, climb—but only, it seems,
because it is "allowed" to do so, as if against
someone's will. Transcending "the reach of Time," it
receives immortality—and perhaps
sublimity—at the body's expense.
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The sonnet's central project is one of renaming, of
purifying the "new place" (Plas Newydd, as Butler and
Ponsonby had named their home) that had become a
cultural metonym for women in love. Although "fierce
Britons" have already supplied a sanctifying
place-name, Wordsworth must rename the vale yet again,
displacing the "Cambrian tongue" to cover or supplement
the sanctifying name with one that reinforces the
Anglicization of Celtic space. In naming the Glyn the
Vale of Friendship, whatever is fierce or wild is yet a
second time covered by English gentility. One must
smile, however, when one learns that in the Welsh,
Wordsworth in his misspelling has actually named this
the Vale of Horse Haunches or Horse Shanks—"Glyn
Cafaillgaroch"—close to, but not the same as, the
correct word for friendship, "Cyfeillgarwch"—an
unintended signifier of the physicality that the poem
shows itself in the act of covering.
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That the sonnet is a cover story is
suggested by Wordsworth's private account of meeting
Butler and Ponsonby, which was published with the poem
in 1881. The women appear to him a bizarre and rather
gothic pair: "so curious was the appearance of these
ladies, so elaborately sentimental about themselves and
their 'Caro Albergo', as they named it in an
inscription on a tree that stood opposite," and "so
oddly was one of these ladies attired that we took her,
at a little distance, for a roman Catholic priest. . .
. They were without caps, their hair bushy and white as
snow, which contributed to the mistake" (Wordsworth,
Complete). Such a passage makes clear the
selectivity of the images in the sonnet and the project
of substitution that erases Butler and Ponsonby's
strange, curious, odd, old, and foreign—Catholic,
Italian—style.
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"To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss P.," then,
reaffirms the difference between "Michael" and
"Christabel" in the Lyrical Ballads,
instantiating English domesticity where alien wildness
and transgressive gender might have reigned. Against
Coleridge's gothic horror we have Wordsworth's
cleansing rite. Where Coleridge points to the sexual
through metonym, Wordsworth erases it through metaphor.
These two poems, aesthetically and formally
incommensurate to be sure, seem to me nonetheless to
embody the oppositions that sapphic subjectivity is
negotiating in the Romantic age: on the one hand, the
secret realm of the sexualized and dangerous, on the
other the public and sisterly space of the
pastoral.
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Mediating these poetic postures, whether in explicit
response or only implicit dialogue, is Dorothy
Wordsworth's "Irregular Verses," which laments the loss
of just the kind of female affinity that Butler and
Ponsonby lived out. Wordsworth lost her mother at six
and her father at twelve and lived most of her
childhood apart from her family. She loved two people
with particular passion and in different ways lost both
of them. Much has rightly been written about Dorothy's
devotion to William, and without question William
provided the most lasting connection of her life. But
Dorothy also loved Jane Pollard, her closest friend in
Halifax, and the biographical record has played down
the intensity of that love. Dorothy had hoped to make a
life with Jane, assuring her in one early letter that
"no man I have seen has appeared to regard me with any
degree of partiality; nor has anyone gained my
affections, of this you need not doubt" (Dorothy
Wordsworth, Letters 26). As her own doubts
assail her, she tells Jane that "no words can paint my
affection and friendship for you my dear Girl. When
shall we meet! sometimes I am in despair and think that
happy time will never arrive, at others I am all hope,
but despair, alas! frequently gets the better of me"
(Letters 14). Another letter imagines their
reunion:
I entreat you my love to think . . . of what will be
our felicity when we are again united . . . think of
our moonlight walks attended by my own dear William,
think of our morning rambles when we shall--after
having passed the night together and talked over the
pleasures of the preceding evening, steal from our
lodging-room, perhaps before William rises, and walk
alone enjoying all the sweets of female friendship. I
have nothing to recommend me to your regard but a
warm honest and affectionate heart, a heart that will
be for ever united to yours by the tenderest
friendship, that will sympathize in all your feelings
and palpitate with rapture when [I] once more throw
myself into your arms (Letters 100).
It is interesting that the triadic family Dorothy
imagines here bears the shape not of "Michael" or of
the biographical threesome that forged the Lyrical
Ballads—two Wordsworths and
Coleridge—but that of the Leolines: two women and
a man. Here Dorothy is the hinge uniting William and
Jane.
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But William, of course, married, and so did Jane,
and in her later years an ill and emotionally isolated
Dorothy lamented happier times when longing was still
tempered by hope. Most of Dorothy Wordsworth's poetry
dates from these years; she seems to have used the
poems as a means of measuring early fantasies against
her later life. Among the several interesting features
of this poetry are lush images that one can read as
sexual: "foaming streamlets," "secret nooks," and rocks
"with velvet moss o'ergrown" and "hips of glossy red"
to which the poet is "tempted" and "seduced." But
Wordsworth's most pervasive image is the woodland
cottage that she chooses explicitly against the
sublimity of a "Kubla Khan" in a passage that also
opposes womblike shelter to phallic heights: "the
shelter of our rustic Cot / Receives us, & we envy
not / The palace or the stately dome" (Dorothy
Wordsworth, Romanticism 175-237).[10]
-
Asked by Jane Pollard's daughter Julia to write a
Christmas verse, Dorothy began her extended work on the
poem she would call "Irregular Verses." While the
poem is clearly not a direct response to William's
sonnet, it imagines a romantic pastoral much like the
one associated with Butler and Ponsonby: a life
"exquisite and pure" in "a cottage in a verdant dell"
enveloped by plenitude. The Llangollen couple were
famous for their gardens, and Dorothy creates here
likewise a "garden stored with fruits and flowers / And
sunny seats and shady bowers," supporting a life whose
completeness is emphasized through the repetition of
"all" and "every" in lines 7-8. But Dorothy infuses
sexuality back into the scene, as if revising her
brother's imagery and suggesting the compatibility of
pleasure and virtue in female same-sex bonds. Where
Butler and Ponsonby were described as faithful to a
"low-roofed Cot," Dorothy and Jane "raised a tower/Of
bliss" (13-14). Their stream does not merely "mingle"
but "foams"; their wanderings "to the topmost height"
are invited rather than simply allowed; and there is no
"lack." This project of "hope untamed" is not "vexed"
by "maxims of caution" or "prudent fears." Moreover and
defiantly, this is a state that has no need of poetry
or of the now-reverenced "Poet" (evoked in line 60) who
might as likely be William as a generic type.
-
Surely this scene figures a sapphic sublimity
implicitly as sexual as that of "Christabel" but
without any of Coleridge's predatory and foreboding
images. The difference makes it worth speculating that
Dorothy may have influenced the rejection of
"Christabel" for the Lyrical Ballads once she
came to terms with its partially demonic rendering of
sapphic desires. But "Irregular Verses" turns away from
its own "sight to dream of" to the barren reality that
befalls not those who transgress but those who are
afraid to transgress, as we suddenly learn that "the
cottage fled in air" and the "streamlet never flowed."
These images—a cottage that flees, a stream that
never flowed—suggest an unnatural turn,
"by duty led," from what would have been a
natural happiness with Jane, who has traded the
"brighter gem" of their youth together for a "prince's
diadem." (Jane Pollard married a linen manufacturer
from Leeds and bore eleven children.) Jane's daughter,
the "natural" fruit of this marriage, is figured as
"placid" and "staid," a poor copy of the mother with
whose heart the writer's own still beats in unison. And
even poetry—William's child, one could
argue—is superfluous where there is love, Dorothy
suggests in a passage that surely raises questions
about a woman who centered her life on her brother and
his work.
-
Wordsworth apparently worked intensely on this poem
over a period of several years; that she made at least
three fair copies suggests that she wanted the poem to
circulate. But key lines and sections of the poem are
absent from the two variant copies: the entire last
section (84-107); the mention in line 16 of a "bliss
that (so deemed we) should endure" and, most
dramatically, the section that begins with the fleeing
cottage and extends to the prince's diadem (39-55). In
other words, the variant versions skirt the drama of
homoerotic desire and its concession to heterosexual
convention that is at the heart of the poem: the
rupture itself and the constancy of the longing after
so many years: the love that is also, if differently,
"beyond the reach of Time." If this kind of
self-silencing testifies to the difficulty of
articulating sapphic desires and losses, it also leaves
an idyllic residue in which the scene of parting is
erased.
-
The representation of female intimacy in "Irregular
Verses," as the poem's own title suggests, extends
beyond content and image to poetic form. Dorothy used
the word "irregular" in the titles of three of her
poems, but "Irregular Verses" bears the most glaring
metrical aberrance of the three: the moment in line 43,
the only line of heptameter in the poem: "Though in our
riper years we each pursued a different way." Visually
as well as aurally distinct, this line breaks the poem
in two just at the moment of breach in the
relationship. This "irregularity" seems to me to be a
powerful poetic statement in itself, a truth the
speaker "ne'er strove to decorate" and thus refuses to
reduce to the tetrameter that is the poem's basic
metric form. The few lines of hexameter also stand out
for their common theme: the brightness of youth, the
joys one remembers, the beloved's "rising sigh" for
what could not be. In this uses of irregular metrics,
prosody itself turns into trope: it stands in for, or
figures, something that cannot be said
straightforwardly.
- But as readers of Virgil well know, the pastoral is
already charged with homoerotic possibilities. It
is a female inscription of these possibilities for bliss
in a "humble cottage"—a gender swerve that
parallels the one Byron makes in his list of loving
couples—that Dorothy Wordsworth's "Irregular
Verses" takes up as it mediates the poetic poles here
represented by Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Whether
in explicit response to her brother or only in implicit
dialogue, "Irregular Verses" mourns for just the kind of
female affinity that Butler and Ponsonby lived out.
Wordsworth loved two people with particular passion and
in different ways lost both of them. Much has been
written about the metrics of "Christabel," and it is not
my intention to argue that Coleridge's meter (which, as
several critics have noted, he himself does not
accurately describe)[11]
is simply a function of the "irregular" sexuality of the
text. But the preface does suggest some connection
between the text's "imagery or passion" and its prosody
and Coleridge's choice of the term "wantonly" underscores
the possibility that the "passion" in question is sexual.
Ann Batten Cristall's use of "irregular" in the subtitle
for both her 1795 volume Poetical Sketches in
Irregular Verse and for a very specific
(male-female) love poem, "Thelmon and Carmel: An
Irregular Poem," also links sexuality to irregular
prosody.
-
My suggestion that sexual content in particular may
be connected to professions of irregular poetic form
finds a further source in yet another poem about two
women, Percy Shelley's "Rosalind and Helen" (1818).
Shelley's "modern eclogue" is prefaced by a disclaimer
similar to that of "Christabel" and possibly influenced
by it: "the impulse of the feelings which moulded the
conception of the story," says Shelley, "determined the
pauses of a measure, which only pretends to be regular
inasmuch as it corresponds with, and expresses, the
irregularity of the imaginations which inspired it"
(Shelley 186). As Shelley scholar Neil Fraistat assures
me, this claim of "irregularity" is rare if not unique
in Shelley's work. A poem that is probably biographical
in source, evoking what John Donovan describes as a
rupture of "the long intimacy between Mary and her
girlhood companion Isabel Baxter," "Rosalind and Helen"
projects a fantasy of reunion that "transforms into a
critical and revisionary feminism that is plotted so as
to close on an image that marries the domestic and the
sublime" (Donovan 245, 269). It's important to point
out, however, that this sublimity, like that in
Wordsworth's sonnet, is also structured to transcend
time; the poem devotes much less attention to Rosalind
and Helen's union than to their deaths, and the final,
conditional message is that "if love die not
in the dead / As in the living, none of mortal kind /
Are blest, as now Helen and Rosalind" (ll.
1316-1318).
-
Moreover, while this sublime and domestic union of
two women is never articulated as sexual—though
the use of the Shakespearean names is certainly
suggestive—the early tension between the two
women is marked as a bodily phenomenon, as if
subliminity has to overcome a certain physical
repulsion that subtly evokes "Christabel." When the two
first re-encounter one another, although Helen asks her
"sweet Rosalind" to "come sit by me" and recalls the
"cherished token" of Rosalind's "woven hair" (36-37)
that she still keeps, Rosalind speaks of Helen's
"tainting touch" (42) and Henry describes Rosalind as
"strange" (91). When Helen finally takes Rosalind's
hand as they meet again at evening, the text makes a
point to say that Helen is now "unrepelled"
(my emphasis), implying an earlier repulsion. While
this "taint" and "repulsion" can be explained on one
level by the friends' painful history, it sits upon the
text as a physical obstacle to be overcome before the
pair can settle with their children in what Dorothy
Wordsworth might have called a "cottage of bliss." But
the metrical scene of this domestic union is a scene of
irregularity; it's worth noting that one of the least
euphonious if not technically irregular pairs of lines
in the poem is the one that tells us: "So Rosalind and
Helen lived together / Thenceforth, changed in all
else, yet friends again" (1275-76).
-
Without reducing metrics to sexuality, I would note
that even William Wordsworth's sonnet to Butler and
Ponsonby is irregular within the context of his
oeuvre: while the overwhelming
majority of his sonnets are Petrarchan, "To the Lady
E.B. and the Hon. Miss P." is mainly Spenserian, with
an oddly Petrarchan third quatrain, and its final
rhymed couplet is an exceeding rarity among
Wordsworth's 500-odd sonnets. (I've found it only in
"Scorn Not the Sonnet," where Wordsworth purposes are
manifestly metatextual.) Whether to heroize Butler and
Ponsonby or to foreclose all openness, that couplet
puts the poem, like the "sisters in love," beyond the
reach of earthly scrutiny.[12]
-
Dorothy Wordsworth's poems, however, show a
fascination with an irregularity that is aberrant in
the works of William Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Shelley. There are images of being "tempted" to a road
with a "serpent line" or "lured by a little winding
path" for which the speaker quits "the public road."
But irregularity is even more prominent in Wordsworth's
prosody. Several poems have stanzas of differing
lengths, and many feature irregular lines. A sudden
hexameter will burst forth from a poem written in
tetrameter, for instance, or a line will turn up that
is difficult to scan at all. I am struck by the fact
that many of the irregular lines express loss and
longing: for example "Thither your eyes may
turn—the Isle is passed away" in "Floating
Island," or the more hopeful "And I can look upon the
past without a pang, without a fear" in "To Rotha
Quillinan." Three of her twenty-five or so poems use
"irregular" in their titles or subtitles: "A Holiday at
Gwerndovennant: Irregular Stanzas," "Loving and Liking.
Irregular Verses Addressed to a Child," and "Irregular
Verses."
-
These multiple instances suggest that for Dorothy
Wordsworth, "irregularity" was a declaration of poetic
style and arguably of identity. Since Dorothy reworked
most of her poems on several occasions, she certainly
could have purged them of metrical anomalies. (And
surely William could legitimately have labeled his
"Ode: Intimates of Immortality" as "Irregular Stanzas"
too.) It is also clear that Dorothy Wordsworth knew how
to write in common scansion, yet her niece Dora
Wordsworth claimed that "Aunt cannot write regular
metre," and Dorothy herself wrote in 1806, "I have
no command of language, no power of expressing my
ideas, and no one was ever more inapt at molding words
into regular metre. I have often tried when I have been
walking alone (muttering to myself as is my Brother's
custom) to express my feelings in verse; feelings, and
ideas such as they were, I have never wanted
at those times; but prose and rhyme and blank verse
were jumbled together and nothing every came of it"
(Dora Wordsworth [needspg#]; Dorothy Wordsworth 66).
Given her rejection of more regular verse as "jingling
rhyme," however, might this apparent self-criticism not
function as a backhanded claim to originality? In the
Preface to her Poetical Sketches Ann Batten
Cristall apologizes in what may be a similarly
disingenuous way for her irregularities of prosody by
saying that they are the "wild" practices of one
"without the knowledge of any rules" and that her
poetic subjects are likewise perhaps ill-advised; but
she also uses that irregularity as the grounds for a
claim that her work is original: "I can only say that
what I have written is genuine, and that I am but
little indebted either to ancient or modern poets"
(Cristall 11).
-
I want to speculate that Dorothy Wordsworth's
insistence on "irregularity," repeated in the tropes of
so many poems, constitutes something of what Foucault
would call a "reverse discourse" or "reverse practice"
that was also produced by women of more obvious sapphic
propensity such as Anne Lister, and that serves to tie
sexuality to genius in yet another way. If, as I have
written elsewhere,[13]
gentrywomen could create cover stories for sapphic
affinities by asserting both their class status and
their femininity—hence their
regularity—it is all the more
interesting that some of them nonetheless present
themselves as irregular. Even as Butler and
Ponsonby nurtured a surface—and a
surfeit—of pastoral and domestic tropes that
helped to screen out sexual suspicion, they also named
one of their dogs Sapho, made no pretense of separate
rooms or separate beds, called one another "my
Beloved," wore mannish riding coats long after these
were in fashion, and allowed themselves numerous
eccentricities that set them apart from the norms of
women imagined by Rousseau. Anne Lister, indeed, as
much as becomes Rousseau: in her journal
Lister quotes from the Confessions that "I am
made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even
venture to say that I am like no one in the whole
world" and fashions herself as a "soft, gentleman like"
and quite self-consciously irregular figure.
-
In this light, Anne Lister and Dorothy Wordsworth
bear some striking sympathies. Like Wordsworth, Lister
longed for a primary affiliation with a woman (Mariana
Lawton) who grieved her by marrying. Wordsworth created
irregular verse forms for sexual images; Lister wrote
sexual acts into her journals in secret code. When
Lister finally visited the home of Butler and Ponsonby,
her longing evokes the mood of "Irregular Verses":
Llangollen, she says, "excited in me . . . a sort of
peculiar interest tinged with melancholy. I could have
mused for hours, dreampt dreams of happiness, conjured
up many a vision of . . . hope" (44). Lister's diaries
evoke the plot of "Irregular Verses," a plot of love,
loss and longing for a woman who has chosen marriage to
a man, and Lister shares Dorothy's disdain for those
who marry from "caution" and "prudence": Mariana, like
Jane Pollard, is "too tamely worldly." Lister reports
that she "felt low" after leaving Llangollen, wistful
to see Butler and Ponsonby together, with Mariana at
her side.
-
In Anne Lister's diaries and Dorothy Wordsworth's
poems, sapphic scenarios get written into what their
contemporary Felicia Hemans might have called "the
stately Homes of England"—or in Wordsworth's
case, the "cottage Homes." For Lister, as for
Wordsworth, writing was the primary way to make sense
of oneself in a world where "elective affinities" were
still rarely—and not even in Goethe's novel of
that name—to be lived out. As she recasts her
desires as language, Lister, like Wordsworth,
holds on to irregularity as a kind of master trope for
inscribing herself as a subject, and like so many men
and women both during the Romantic moment and since,
she invokes an image of Butler and Ponsonby, more or
less put to the blush, as the Personification of
same-sex desire. "Throwing my mind on paper always does
me good," Lister writes after her melancholy visit to
Llangollen. One can see Byron making a similar use of
writing when he soothes the "chaos of hope and sorrow"
of parting from Edlestone by vowing to put Butler and
Ponsonby "to the blush." Indeed, the "Ladies of
Llangollen" can also be understood as a Romantic trope
figuring the sublimity and the sorrows of same-sex
desire at a time of intense cultural ambivalence and
ambiguity.
-
The poems I have examined here inscribe that
ambivalence and ambiguity both in their configurations
of desire and in their visions of its fulfillment. If
"Christabel" makes sapphism a mysterious compulsion
with devastating effects, William Wordsworth tames it
into chaste sisterhood while Dorothy Wordsworth
restores its erotic sublimity through metaphor. But
Dorothy also inscribes the materiality of
desire: the pastoral spaces where it might dwell, the
social and economic barriers to its fulfillment, and
the emotional consequences of abandoning desire for
safety. It's also worth nothing that of all the poems,
it is only Wordsworth's sexless sonnet that sustains a
union of two women against some form of loss.
-
The political philosopher Jacques Rancière
has suggested that it is metaphors and stories, not
rational argument as Habermas would have it, that most
effectively shepherd previously unrecognized groups
into a position where their rights can be recognized.
This is indeed the value (and also the limitation) of
the trope: it can figure without even confronting its
own implicit ideology. In this light, the figurations
of sapphism in Romantic poetry may have helped to make
possible the social changes that the poets themselves
might neither have imagined nor approved. It is worth
remembering, therefore, that the very meaning of
"trope" lies in irregularity. Drawn from the Greek
tropein, to turn, the trope is a
perversion, a breaking of rules, a seduction of
language from its proper course. It is also perversely
true, of course, that without tropes there is not much
that we can say. Rather like same-sex union itself,
then, the trope is a kind of 'elective affinity,' and
one without which there would surely be no
representation, no poetry, and perhaps nothing to blush
about.
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