Winter Solstice — Charlotte Smith’s winter mourning & Ethelinde; Stonehenge & Enigma Variations

Constable, a Watercolor sketch of Stonehenge (he did several)

Dear friends and readers,

Over the course of today I noticed on the Internet in the places I visit a continual effort to observe the season. I was guilty of this too, complaining mightily of the continual and thus grating piped in Christmas music inflicted on people for the last few days (in stores, shopping malls, radio, including NPR, and even parking lots). But like others I attempted to spend this ritual time of remembering the past year, of asserting some light against the darkness, in a way congenial to my spirit. I had my beloved pussycats in my study with me (photos to appear tomorrow), and read towards the introduction to my edition of Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake for Valancourt. After more than 3 years I have typed the 5 volume text, written annotations, proofed everything within an inch of their files, and today I read and skimmed biographies of her, some literary criticism of her writing, and read Smith’s moving poetry itself.

Ethelinde is a thoroughly carefully-done worked-out effective symbolic colonialist global radical book about adultery from a woman’s point of view, and an original combination of interiors and landscapes done with brilliant insight. Also the novel’s mirroring of Smith’s relationship with her father and her problems coping with the kinds of macho males aristocratic primogeniture culture created (her husband among them). I will move out from this usual talk just about her novels which prefaces most editions of her novels though; her greatness finally is in her poetry, and it is this poetic spirit that also fuels what is most memorable in Ethelinde, what this spirit projects and how it set going the romantic movement for men and women in the novel as well as poetry (out of which Constable’s art and the genuine valuing of Stonehenge grew, which I cite & reprint because it’s Winter Solstice).

For tonight I can only touch upon one aspect of these: her sonnets to winter, those particularly in which she mourns the death of a beloved daughter, Anna, aged 21, from childbirth, and her adherence to Rousseau at his most radical:

71: Written at Weymouth in Winter

The chill waves whiten in the sharp North-east;
    Cold, cold the night-blast comes, with sullen sound,
And black and gloomy, like my cheerless breast:
    Frowns the dark pier and lonely sea-view round.
Yet a few months–and on the peopled strand
    Pleasure shall all her varied forms display;
Nymphs lightly tread the bright reflecting sand,
    And proud sails whiten all the summer bay:
Then, from these winds that whistle keen and bleak,
    Music’s delightful melodies shall float
O’er the blue waters; but ’tis mine to seek
    Rather, some unfrequented shade, remote
From sights and sounds of gaiety–I mourn
All that gave me delight–Ah! never to return

75:

Where the wild woods and pathless forests frown,
    The darkling Pilgrim seeks his unknown way,
Till on the grass he throws him weary down,
    To wait in broken sleep the dawn of day:
Thro’ boughs just waving in the silent air,
    With pale capricious light the Summer Moon
Chequers his humid couch; while Fancy there,
    That loves to wanton in the Night’s deep noon,
Calls from the mossy roots and fountain edge
    Fair visionary Nymphs that haunt the shade,
Or Naiads rising from the whispering sedge;
    And, ‘mid the beauteous group, his dear loved maid
Seems beckoning him with smiles to join the train:
Then, starting from his dream, he feels his woes again!

Among the many allusions in the set are several to Brook Boothby’s sonnets on the death of a beloved child, aged 5, Penelope; Boothby and Smith shared a love of Rousseau’s Julie, or La Nouvelle Heloise, Confessions, and Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Boothby was the first publisher of Rousseau’s Confessions and Joseph Wright’s portrait of him (Boothby was a patron of Wright’s) in a highly unusual (un-masculine) position is famous:

When I first fell in love with Smith in the 1980s I could not know how deeply she would be able to speak to me nor understand why she spoke so deeply to me a couple of centuries later. I was hungry for writing about and for women openly from the point of view I recognized in Austen, Bronte and some early twentieth century European Virago women novelists (though I didn’t know this label then): one novel few may have heard of that I loved is Lady Ursula Chewynd-Talbot’s The Gentlewoman (her pseudonym Laura Talbot), another Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph. Novels by Elizabeth Taylor (The Soul of Kindness); later on I read Rosamund Lehmann (The Weather in the Streets where the heroine has an abortion and reading Austen’s Pride and Prejudice helps her through; had she known it Charlotte Smith would’ve been as efficacious).

Virago cover for The Gentlewoman (Wilma met kat, 1940, by Carol Willink)

The later 18th century was an era when women as a group for the first time were self-consciously in public (not just implicitly as in the later 17th century in France) writing as women, presenting themselves as shaped by their gender and experiences so as to carve out a new kind of space and experience to write about. The overt life-writing this led to was ridiculed. In a book on 18th century women’s poetry Juliet Hawley writes Smith (among others of the era) refused to enact this pattern of “rewarded suffering” that we find in Austen’s Persuasion, of “a sacrificial offering by the subject which will be blessed and transformed,” which is close to “the traditional structure and economy of the elegy” — justifying among other things war.

Peter Sacks argues “that (male) elegies carry out the work of successful mourning: at the core of each male procedure is the renunciatory experience of loss and the acceptance, not just of a substitute, but of the very means and practice of substitution. In each case such an acceptance is the price of survival; and in each case a successful resolution is not merely deprivatory, but offers a form of compensatory reward. The elegist’s reward, especially, involve inherited legacies and consoling identifications with symbolic, even immortal, figures of power.” This is “an oedipal struggle for mastery and the right to inherit which is often played out in terms of a mastery over nature.” This “model of elegy equates a ‘healthy’ mourning with the renunciation of the dead, and is deeply entangled with masculine power struggles.”

We can read the traditional formal elegy, alongside which Charlotte Smith’s elegiac sonnets have been read, and Austen’s Persuasion these ways: in Austen’s case, the experience is disguised by slight amused-irony but entering deeply into the lasting grief of Anne Elliot, where the close is read as elevating and transcending the grief; in Smith’s she will not forget the dead person, cannot get over the loss and it remains endlessly; she is asked to live a deprived forlorn existence, impoverished, with children dying young, and find some compensatory substitute in say poetry. I say in reply that Harville does not forget or transcend the loss of his sister; and that Smith is more than justified; her cries if we will act on them could be on behalf of removing the causes of her grief. She is one of our earliest “internal exiles” — lives among people seemingly like herself but her interior life and real social existence makes her an exile.

Fast forward to the early 20th century (the era of the Viragos I cited above), Jahan Ramazani argues that modern poets “such as Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath refuse to use the dead as stepping stones to power in this way.” By “refusing to participate in the economy of ‘healthy’ mourning, certain modern poets occupy a critical position in their poetry which is akin to ‘melancholia’, the state which Freud designates the opposite of ‘successful’ mourning:” these are works of deep protest, these women and men who dare to write this way are not interested in power or obedience or conformity.” In Ethelinde Smith argues fiercely against life as competitive performance and for living in ways that defy all recognition of status hierarchy.

I mean to contextualize Ethelinde in this kind of scheme: if it is among the earliest of novels (I combine insights from Lorraine Fletcher and Jacqueline Labbe) to combine “the motif of persecution” with an imaginatively gut-level use of landscape too, then we are reaching the power of the text.

Another theme of is that of the mother, motherhood, transgressive sex, not as explicit as the later novels — though the title of the book, the recluse refers to the mother of the hero, and her mother lived out of wedlock with a beloved man; Mrs Montgomery’s mother (never named) is marginalized, her sons by this man disinherited (Mrs Montgomery is herself legitimate — natch); Smith also makes one of her transgressive women a bad adulteress, a woman who is indifferent to mothering (Maria, Lady Newenden). But even Lady Newenden (cold materialist, all the things we are supposed to reject) who probably dies of a miscarriage from an adultery with a cad is finally empathized with.

Reading Smith’s poetry I see her enacting the grief-striken mother everywhere, and in her novels many figurations of women as mothers and adulteresses or chaste controlled women separated from their husbands. Smith’s deepest repeated subject is a mother and her daughter/s and sons. And the man cut off from marriage from a woman he loves: Sir Edward Newenden, the novel’s deprived hero (Ethelinde does not love him, but one of Smith’s tempestuous chivalric — over indulged, spoilt — males), a mirror of her own fleeting experience in the early 1790s after 30 years of abuse from her violent macho ever-so-socially glamorous husband.

I conclude (keeping in mind this is Winter Solstice and I am supposed to be commemorating, remembering, enacting) how Jim loved the Enigma Variations by Elgar — these seem to me to stay with the position of melancholia I find in Smith. Elgar adds the costume drama aesthetic of dignity and order, surface harmony, which to my mind suits Sir Edward Newenden as a musical motif (in later of her novels this figure of the male will write soaring depressed poetry like the second sonnet above)), he is a kind of Mr Knightley figure who may duels but reads Cowper too:

Ellen