Smith, Charlotte (Turner) 4 May 1749 - 28 October 1806.

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Smith, Charlotte (Turner)

4 May 1749 - 28 October 1806

British poet and novelist who never wrote a "Gothic" work. So what's she doing here? Simple: she helped invent the Gothic, in large part due to the influence of her works on Ann Radcliffe. (She also helped invent Romanticism and William Wordsworth, and never gets much credit for that, either.) She did this by bringing to the sentimental novel-extremely popular in her day-a sophisticated aesthetic sense (informed by her deep interest in landscape and painting) that included a thorough knowledge of the sublime and the picturesque. Setting important episodes and characters in both sublime and picturesque landscapes, Smith heightened the emotional and aesthetic register of her works, thus bringing them in line with-and/or helping to create, actually-the emerging intellectual and cultural currents of Romanticism.

There are "Gothic" elements in only a few of Smith's early works, for by her own admission she was uninterested in literary sensationalism and in the supernatural; adverse financial circumstances (a profligate and irresponsible husband, largely) led her to novel-writing in the first place (she preferred poetry), and the success of her first novel, Emmeline (1788), showed her that sales could be positively affected by the inclusion of the sorts of dramatic scenes she was writing. But her own interest in political and social issues, heightened by her first-hand experience with the early moments of the French Revolution, led her away from even the quasi-Gothic traces in her first three novels (Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle; Ethelinde, the Recluse of the Lake; and Celestina. A Novel).

Smith herself wrote, in a letter to a friend who had suggested she include more botanical imagery in her work (botany being an extremely fashionable "pop science" of the very late C18), that "I have not forgotten (being still compelled to write, that my family may live) your hint of introducing botany into a novel. The present rage for gigantic and impossible horrors, which I cannot but consider as a symptom of morbid and vitiated taste, makes me almost doubt whether the simple pleasures afforded by natural objects will not appear vapid to the admirers of spectre novels and cavern adventure. However, I have ventured a little of it, and have at least a hope that it will not displease those whose approbation I most covet" (15 March 1798). Her sentiments here about the Gothic are very close to those reported by Wordsworth in the 1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

The Romanticism of Charlotte Turner Smith:

Plurality of Vision

According to some critics, Charlotte Turner Smith, (1749-1806), "was the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic" (Curran, Intro, The Poems of Charlotte Smith). The first edition of her Elegiac Sonnets, written in 1783 while she was in debtor's prison with her husband and children, brought her sudden fame. Her most direct beneficiary among the canonical male poets was William Wordsworth who says in an essay that Smith was a poet "to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered" (The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: Critical and Ethical, Vo III). Smith, as with many other women writers of the period, was largely forgotten by the second half of the nineteenth century. My paper, "The Romanticism of Charlotte Turner Smith: Plurality of Vision," is not only an exploration of her aesthetics and politics, but also an effort to begin to begin the process of remembering.

Charlotte Turner Smith embodies oppositions through the blurring of boundaries between disparate forces. But the harmony that Smith represents does not obliterate differences; rather, her inclination is to accomodate a multiplicity of positions at once. As Smith opens her text to opposing voices, she melds the dualities of the inner and the outer, the private and the socio- political, the material and the spiritual to form an organic whole that suggests connections and possibly the reconciliation of opposites. In my paper, I will discuss Smith's poetics in terms of her attempt to reconcile conflict by asserting the necessity of connection in two of her works, The Emigrants and Beachy Head. Both poems work to blur boundaries in support of her idea of reciprocity.

Smith's strategy to embody oppositions harmoniously can be described by the notion of "both at once," a concept that feminist critic Diana Fuss extracts from the thought of French psychoanalysist Luce Irigaray. The basis of the French writer's philosophy is that women's sexuality is plural, "never being simply one" (354) through the image of the two vaginal lips touching. As the lips touch, they do not consume or absorb each other. Fuss says: "Three words neatly summarize for Irigaray the significance of the two lips: `Both a once.' Both at once signifies that a woman is simultaneously singular and double (58). The multiplicity of female desire is reflected in a particular system of language and thought that enables Smith to encompass several positions within herself in relation to the outside world but always with the aim of blurring boundaries to achieve reciprocity and reconciliation.

In The Emigrants, published in 1793, a year after the French King was deposed and imprisoned with his family, the narrator immediately begins the work of blurring boundaries between subject and object through identification with the victims of the Revolution. On a gloomy, wintry morning, the narrator-subject positions herself on a cliff looking down upon "the troubled waves" (1.2). The word "troubled" is key in establishing the mood and tone of the poem, suggesting the conflicts that Smith attempts to resolve in the poem. As the narrator reflects on her own misery, she sees a group of victims of the French Revolution who mirror her private sense of alienation. By focusing on this common condition, she sets up a reciprocal action, or a merging of the subject (herself) with the object (the exiles). In Simone de Beauvoir's discussion of the Other, she says "the subject can be posed only in being opposed--he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object" (xvii). In the poem, however, Smith's narrator recognizes the reciprocity of relations that exists between the subject and the object, or the One and the Other. De Beauvoir explains the relationship between the two as a mirror of the interaction between the native and the foreigner: "The native traveling abroad is shocked to find himself in turn regarded as a `stranger' by the natives of neighboring countries" (xvii). This fluid, back and forth movement works to integrate the two forces of subject and object and ideally reach a higher plane not only of reciprocity but of dissolving of the one into the other.
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The image of water in Smith's poetry echoes the narrator's constant motion toward harmonizing. The fluid element becomes the controlling metaphor for Smith's capacity to encompass differences harmoniously in a multitude of realms and settings. Water, associated with a life-giving power, has the capacity to surround and take the form of any object with which it comes in contact while still keeping its own individual qualities. In The Emigrants, for example, the same water laps on the shores of England and also touches the beaches of France. This fluid element, celebrating life, surrounds the island upon which the ...

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