Smith, Charlotte (Turner) 4 May 1749 - 28 October 1806.
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.
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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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 narrator positions herself, but it also reaches to the other side. The "Other," which de Beauvoir has positioned as being outside of the One or Male subject, is also absorbed by the same water. This dominant image, then, unites multiple positions through a flowing process, asserting the ideal of reciprocity. Smith's plurality of vision champions what she refers to as "This wond'rous World of Waters" (1.20), the site for the blurring of boundaries.
Smith's ideas of reciprocity and reconciliation of multiplicities are very much tied to Irigaray's notion of a woman being "neither one nor two" (352). By embodying multiplicity, Smith glides easily between what Anne K. Mellor describes as the two tendencies within Romanticism. These are the feminine, based on sympathy and likeness, and the masculine, structured on individual rights and the power of the self. Smith, in her poetry, undermines these binaries in such a way that, according to Mellor, "Once polarity and balance are destroyed, one can explore new throught-modes and deconstruct old systems into a liberating chaos, flux, or playfulness" (Rom and Fem 5). Indeed, Smith liberates herself from the traditional definitions imposed by high Romanticism and constructs her own system based on flux and fluid motions.
One such definition that Smith reshapes is the Romantic theme of constant striving for the inaccessible. Hegel says this yearning characterizes the main affliction of the Romantics: "The subject desires to penetrate into truth and has a craving for objectivity, but yet is unable to abandon its isolation and retirement into itself, and to strip itself free of this unsatisfied abstract inwardness (of mind), and so has a seizure of sickly yearning" (73). Smith's poetry contradicts this definition. The narrator, as she struggles with yearning in these lines:
Onward I labour; as the baffled wave
Which yon rough beach repulses, that returns
With the next breath of wind, to fail again.-- (1.71-3)
offers an alternative: "Ah! Mourner--cease these wailings: cease and learn" (74). In The Emigrants, the narrator detaches from the absorption into the inner self and even liberates herself from a destructive obsession. She sees a better place for herself in society in the future and clearly states that her personal woes are dependent on an external system that ignores the needs of the individual. Smith's stance is not one of dead-end lamentations. Contradicting Stuart Curran's suggestion that she made a "virtual career out of self-pity" (Rom and Fem, 199), Smith shows in the poem that it is imperative to go outside of the self to gain a wider perspective on the causes of personal suffering.
This yearning to be released from suffering, then, takes on a different tone in Smith's poetry. As Lillian Furst argues, the yearning "springs largely from the idealization of all that is beyond reach" (4). But for Smith, her ideal system of justice and equality is indeed grounded in the sphere of the possible; what she proposes is a realistic reformation of society so the needs of the individual will be served. She is direct in citing the source of the trouble:
my weary soul recoils
From proud oppression, and from legal crimes
(For such are in this Land, where the vain boast
Of equal Law is mockery, while the cost
Of seeking for redress is sure to plunge
Th' already injur'd to more certain ruin
And the wretch starves before his Counsel pleads (1.35-41)
This examination of society displays Smith's keen awareness of injustices embedded in the political system that has caused her own personal pain as well as that of the French exiles. Through her tragic stories of the cloistered monk, the poor and pious priest, the mother and child who die during a storm, the noble who comes home to find his family murdered, the imprisoned son of the King and the impoverished laborer, Smith links these characters' private pain with the political realm. In her compassion for all suffering, Smith insists on a public program of reform that includes what Mellor calls the "values of domesticity--of such private virtues as sympathy, tolerance, generosity and a commitment to the preservation of familial affections" (Rom and Fem 212). Smith's proposal is to apply these virtues to resolve the conflict set up by differences. While she sees the injustices and inequities that led to the overthrow of the monarchy, she also sees the violence and the carnage inherent in its triumph. While she sympathizes with the nobility who have been dispossessed, she also sees the struggles of those they enslaved. She is able to encompass multiple positions in her panoramic view of the world around her.
Despite her commitment to a fluidity that works to blur boundaries and offers a view of interconnectedness, Smith is also grounded to a solid sense of social and political outrage. She denounces class inequality and corruption. Comparing the nobles with the laborers, she displays a sophisticated awareness of class differences that suggests the common bond of humanity goes beyond any stratefied system. She tells the tale of the young nobleman with his
... high consciousness of noble blood,
Which he has learn'd from infancy to think
Exalts him o'er the race of common men" (1.235-7)
and then wonders if this pampered nobleman can ever learn to think that "worth alone is true Nobility" (1.240). Praising the individual, she does homage to the peasant who, "amid the sons
Of Reason, Valour, Liberty, and Virtue,
Displays distinguished merit, is a Noble
Of Nature's own creation!" (1.241-44).
For Smith, an inequitable system of class structure is based on a corruption that paves the way for an unmerited social position. Her political savvy derives from an awareness of the historical conditions of her society. This position refutes the notion that Romantic poetry is escapist and apolitical in nature. As Virginia Woolf states, "Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground but, like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners" (43). Smith's work is closely connected to her society, reflecting the merger of the inner states of mind with the outer social forces. She is vitally aware that part of the answer to the world's problems lies within individuals and their capacity to change their values. Her ideal view of society is impossible to achieve without the transformation of the individual.
Thirteen years later, just before she died in 1806, Smith wrote Beachy Head. This poem, published the following year, also showcases shifts in focus and a multiplicity of perspectives: the far and near merge and appear harmoniously. While Smith depicts a more introspective narrator who stresses the notion that life is a constant process of unfolding, she does not lose the desire for the ideals of reciprocity and reconciliation that she believes are core conditions for harmony and peace. Nor does she lose her social and political awareness and concern. In this poem, however, nature itself becomes another organ ized system with its own rules and conditions that needs to be taken into account. At the same time that Smith portrays the individual resolving the self in nature, she admonishes that total absorption is not beneficial: the ideals of reciprocity and reconciliation can only succeed in bringing harmony if they do not obliterate individual identity.
The most startling quality in the poem is the broad range of material Smith covers. She deals with history, politics, economics,botany, and anthropology, combining these social and natural systems with the very personal and abstract issues of unrequited love, death and innocence. She balances the focus on the minute detail with the broad panoramic view, reflecting the interweaving of the public and the private, the political and the personal. The narrator, in quiet contemplation, muses both about historical events and private, intimate moments. At one point, she delineates the war fever of the Norman invasion:
In the mailed ranks
Of Normans landing on the British coast
Rode Taillefer; and with astounding voice
Thunder'd the war song daring Roland sang (132-135)
She juxtaposes this sweeping panoramic view of history and politics with detailed explications of birds and plantlife in her personal surroundings. In a journey to the cottage garden, she pays close attention to the individual aspects of a plant:
... the wood sorrel, with its light thin leaves,
Heart-shaped, and triply folded; and its root
Creeping like beaded coral (361-363)
The narrator's ability combines minute details and historical events works to show how one realm is not exclusive of the other, blurring the boundaries between the far and near, the subject and the object: she connects disparate worlds and inhabits several positions at once. Judith Pascoe believes that Smith's use of the close-up is a strategy aimed at empowering the narrator: "Smith employs the extreme close-up of the botanist's gaze, creating an explosion of dazzling specificity, so that the limitations of a female vantage point become forces of liberation" (205). But Smith's focus on the remote also strengthens her position because it amplifies her vision. The narrator is able to go outside her immediate realm of the quotidian and speculate on the historical forces that have molded the world in which she lives.
The shifts in movement from one perspective to another suggest there may be no boundaries separating these positions, eliminating the need to privilege one over the other. As in The Emigrants, the narrator starts with a view from the top: "On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime!" (1). This position immediately empowers the narrator. Pascoe suggests that Smith has taken hold of the subject position traditionally reserved for the male: "The favored stance of the Romantic poet--poised on a mountain top overlooking the world--is not an easy one for a female poet to assume" (204). However, Smith assumes it with ease, suggesting a self-empowerment. The narrator dominates through her vision from above; she is poised over the world she is examining and interpreting. But immediately she begins making connections. The rock is tied to the quotidian daily life of mariners but also to a moment in the past when, according to one theory, England was torn from the rest of Europe:
... when the omnipotent
Stretched forth his arm, and rent the solid hills,
Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between
The rifted shores ... (6-9)
However, even as she assumes the position of power, reclining on the summit while "Fancy should go forth" (4) and do the work of the imagination while she rests, she does not reduce nature, or history, or the country people to a position of object. She goes beyond the traditional subject-object positions and dignifies the "other" by acknowledging the validity of its own particular system. Her constant return to the examination of details suggests a desire to merge disparities through perception and knowledge.
The blurring of boundaries has temporal as well as spatial implications. The rich sense of history in the poem works to firmly tie the past with the present. The narrator speculates about the shift of the sea from the land as she finds "fossil shells," suggesting the sea may have covered up the area at one time. Life continues its constant forward motion while "vain disputes" rage in the intellectual world just as the peasant continues with his own process of living close to the rhythms of nature:
Unheeding such inquiry; with no care
But that the kindly change of sun and shower,
Fit for his toil the earth he cultivates (396-398)
This process of continuity, of organic growth and the unstoppable unfolding process of life includes death. The narrator melds the living with the dead, as another attempt both to forge connections and to emphasize the idea of process and the break down of boundaries. Connecting life and death is the ultimate motion in Smith's plan to harmonize and reconcile. The following scene illustrates how the two are linked:
As little recks the herdsman of the hill,
Who on some turfy knoll, idly reclined,
Watches his wether flock, that deep beneath
Rest the remains of men, of whom is left
No traces in the records of mankind (399-403)
As life and death are balanced and connected, so is thedestruction of war with the healing motion of peace. War's devastating effect on the land is tempered by the herdsman who is now living upon it in peace:
Of that dismantled fortress; rais'd what time
The Conqueror's successors fiercely fought,
Tearing with civil feuds the desolate land.
But now a tiller of the soil dwells there
And of the turret's loop'd and rafter'd halls
Has made an humbler homestead (497-502)
The tiller of the land has been able to construct something positive out of a ravaged area. The cyclical motion between these two conditions of the land implies that stasis is untenable in the universe.
The insistence on connecting and melding does not imply a desire to solidify, but to reconcile in such a way that the individual characteristics of each are not lost. This fluid momentum that can encompass various positions with ease is reflected in the poem's main image: water. As in The Emigrants, water divides countries but also joins them. But in Beachy Head, the water never loses its central position. Water frames the poem; it is there when the narrator starts her imaginary travels and is still there when she returns from her fanciful flight into the woods, inside a cave, and into the cottage garden. In this poem, however, the images include rivers, streams, and brooks, suggesting a more placid existence in contrast with the agitated action of the waves in the sea. Here, the narrator is more concerned with the side of nature that is reliable as opposed to the unpredictable quality exemplified in the tumultuous waters that in the end claim the life of the cave hermit. The images of rivers, streams and brooks allow the narrator to leave the ocean's shores but still be accompanied by symbols of fluidity and movement as she goes inland on her quest. The sea, however, is a power that overshadows all the gentler sides of nature that she has visited. It is the triumphing image because it has the power to kill: while nature offers an alternative to society, it, too, is based on a system that has its own rules.
The reverence the narrator feels for nature forces her outside of herself to balance the introspective position she assumes throughout the poem. Her flights into the self are tempered by the outside system of nature. As an "early worshipper at Nature's shrine," she sees that inner harmony and peace are dependent on systems outside the self (346). Both the lonely stranger who was betrayed in love and the cave hermit "outraged as he was, in sanguine youth/by human crimes" turn to nature as a balm for their personal pain and disillusionment (689-90). They reject society and hide in the world of nature. Both are destroyed in the end. While nature can uplift and heal, we see that it is not the whole answer: the forest stranger disappears and the cave hermit drowns. Smith is suggesting that escapism and the constant yearning for the unattainable are destructive. The answer lies not in rejecting the world in favor of nature but in connecting the two and recognizing the reciprocal action between nature and society. While she celebrates the beauty and simplicity of nature and the joy it can bring, Smith's message is that solitude is not the answer. The separation of the self from the rhythm of society is destructive because it rejects the concept of reciprocity and reconciliation, and constructs an extremist, unyielding position.
The narrator's self-absorption is continuously being interrupted by the community that surrounds her. She talks about the fishermen, the shepherd, the hind, the rough dweller, the matron and her children, the innocent boy, the village girl and her little brother. Their stories tend to deflect the focus from the self and celebrate society and community. Smith's tendency to reach outward brings into her poetry a social and political dimension that is necessarily joined to her insights about the position of the self in society and nature. We can see her concern with the inequality between classes when she contrasts the life of the mother and children who toil piling stones with those who pass by in their chariots "Where prosperous Fortune sits" (243). But not only does she make a social statement about the disparity of wealth insociety, sh also rejects the premise that such riches are needed for happiness. Often, beyond the superficial veneer of luxury, an inner sorrow is impossible to suppress:
what secret care
or sick satiety is often hid,
Beneath the splendid outside: He knows not
How frequently the child of Luxury
Enjoying nothing, flies from place to place
In chase of pleasure that eludes his grasp
And that content is e'en less found by him
Than by the labourer, whose pick-axe smooths
The road before his chariot; (243-48)
Happiness, Smith seems to be saying, in addition to individual merit and worth has nothing to do with the possession of luxuries. Smith's political vision attempts to bring about an awareness of the reciprocity that exists between all people. Although the classes are sharply divided, they must recognize their reciprocity is necessary for survival.
Smith, in The Emigrants and Beachy Head, weaves a multiplicity of disparate positions into an interconnected system based on reconciliation and reciprocity--but not at the expense of individual identity. This motion to unite results in a blending of past and present, turbulence and peace, science and art, reason and imagination, and even life and death. Both poems deal with the material realities of every day life, while at the same time include a spiritual dimension. Smith just as easily takes on the position of subject as she identifies with the object. As she bursts through the established boundaries of gender and seizes the subjective position of the masculine, she also taps into the traditional feminine vision of harmony and peace. The desire for unity expressed in the poems dissolves boundaries and sets up a center position that contains and embraces multiplicity, in the self as well as in society. Smith's strategy of making connections but not totally collapsing differences offers a provocative alternative vision, a plurality of vision that signals a new Romantic ideal.
Works Cited
Curran, Stuart. "Introduction." The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Stuart Curran. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. xix-xxix.
-------. "Romantic Poetry: The I Altered." Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988. 185-207.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Bantam, 1952.
Furst, Lilian R. The Contours of European Romanticism. London: Macmillan, 1979.
Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Introd Lectures on Aesthetics. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which Is Not One." Feminisms. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. 350-6.
Mellor, Anne K. "On Romanticism and Feminism." Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988. 3-9.
------ Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Pascoe, Judith. "Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith." Revisioning Romanticism. Ed. Carlo Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994. 193-209.
Smith, Charlotte. Beachy Head. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Stuart Curran. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
------The Emigrants. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Stuart Curran. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Harmondsmith: Penguin, 1945.