"Put to the Blush": Romantic Irregularities and Sapphic Tropes

Susan S. Lanser, Brandeis University

¹ See, "Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts," Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (Winter 1998-99), 179-98, and "The Political Economy of Same-Sex Desire," in Attending to Early Modern Women V.
close window

² In the later eighteenth century, public opinion seems to have been especially susceptible to three particular axes of perception: the "femininity" or "masculinity" of the women in question; the extent to which they adhered to proprieties of class and gender; and their social rank. Long-term, female attachments that conformed externally to social codes, and were lived out by women of what I call the gentle classes, had the greatest chance of passing for pure.
close window

³ See Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role, 203, 14, and passim.
close window

⁴ I take this definition from the Oxford English Dictionary.
close window

⁵ At another level of figuration, one could argue that Geraldine and Christabel are themselves metonyms of their fathers: just as the spell upon Christabel becomes "Lord of [her] utterance," so Geraldine's seduction of daughter and father alike can be read as the revenge of her own father, Lord Roland de Vaux. But Geraldine is also arguably taking her revenge against patriarchy itself; seized forcibly at the outset by "five warriors," left "scarce alive" beneath the maternal "broad-breasted" oak, Geraldine wreaks vengeance on the Father by violating first the daughter and then perhaps the family line.
close window

⁶ Had Coleridge not excised the description of Geraldine as "old and lean and foul of hue," or "Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue," it might have been more difficult to read sublimity into the poem. Susan Eilenberg reports the former deleted line in Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession, 104; Arthur Nethercot reports the latter in The Road to Tryermaine: A Study of the History, Background, and Purposes of Coleridge's "Christabel", 32.
close window

⁷ Alaric Alfred Watts, Alaric Watts: A Narrative of His Life, I, 239. I owe my knowledge of this reference to Elfenbein's Romantic Genius, but Elfenbein does not explain that Wordsworth's comment postdates by half a century his decision about the Lyrical Ballads.
close window

⁸ I thank Neil Fraistat for suggesting this contrast between "Christabel" and the sonnet.
close window

⁹ "To the Lady E. B. and the Hon. Miss P." was first published in Miscellaneous Sonnets (1827) as part of the five-volume edition of Wordsworth's Poems. I have taken this version from The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, 216.
close window

¹⁰ Dorothy Wordsworth's extant poems have been gathered and edited by Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, 175-237.
close window

¹¹ See, for example, Brennan O'Donnell, "The 'Invention' of a Meter: 'Christabel' Meter as Fact and Fiction," JEGP 100, 4 (October 2001): 511-36; and Margaret Russett, "Meter, Identity, Voice: Untranslating Christabel," SEL 43, 4 (Autumn 2003): 773-97.
close window

¹² It's also worth noting that each of these poems also yokes female affiliations to charged family ties, supporting Foucault's hypothesis that at the turn of the nineteenth century kinship and sexuality have converged in ways that give domestic relations a new burden of affectivity. Sapphism and incest both stand at the crossroads between kinship demands and elective desires: if incest undoes kinship by overloading it from within, sapphism undoes it by displacing it from without.
close window

¹³ See Lanser, "Befriending the Body."
close window