Abstract
An often subtle, sometimes brutal tension between imaginative power and the claims of femininity marked the writing of women in the Romantic epoch. ‘Every Eye Sees differently As the Eye — Such the Object’, wrote Blake in one of his best known aphorisms, locating the source of truth for Romantic man in the complicated realm of the individual subjectivity.1 Blake’s intense celebration of the power of visionary desire lacked the universality he himself might have claimed for it. This exciting, potent ideal could not be translated into female imagination without great difficulty and danger.
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Notes
William Blake, Poetry and Prose (ed.) David V. Erdman, Commentary by Harold Bloom (New York: Doubleday, 1970) p. 634. Hereafter cited as B.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Reflections from Damaged Life, transl. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso Editions, 1985) p. 95. Hereafter cited as A.
David Aers, ‘Blake: Sex, Society and Ideology’, Romanticism and Ideology, Studies in English Writing, 1765–1830 (eds) D. Aers, J. Cook, D. Punter (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) p. 37.
See also Anne K. Mellor, ‘Blake’s Portrayal of Women’, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly (Winter 1982–3) pp. 148–155.
Susan Fox, ‘The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry’, Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 507–519
Irene Taylor, ‘The Woman Scaly’ Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 6 (1973) pp. 74–87.
Friedrich von Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms (1797–1800), transl. E. Behler, R. Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968) p. 81.
Mme de Staël, De L’Allemagne, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Nicolle, 1818) 1:255 (my translation).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (eds) James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate (Princeton University Press, 1984) p. 304. Hereafter cited as BL.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, transl. F.P.B. Osmaston, 4 vols. (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975) 1:109.
For an analysis of the Romantic image, though without direct reference to the feminine see Paul de Man, ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,’ in Romanticism and Consciousness (ed.) Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970) p. 70.
also Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter, the Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 23.
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, transl. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 31.
See Michael Cooke, Acts of Inclusion, Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) p. 120.
John Keats, Letters, 1814–1821, 2 vols. (ed.) H.E. Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958) 1:386–7. Hereafter cited as K.
Margaret Homansin ‘Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters’ Instruction’, Critical Inquiry 8 (1981) pp. 223–241, brings together ‘Nutting’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’ as two poems in which the sister must listen and learn.
William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere (ed.) Beth Darlington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) p. 45. Hereafter cited as HG.
For an extended analysis of the uses of bodily space in the Romantic self-image, see Meena Alexander, The Poetic Self: Towards a Phenomenology of Romanticism (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1979).
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, edited with an introduction by James T. Boulton (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) p. 64. Hereafter cited as SB.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (eds) Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977) p. 74. Hereafter cited as S.
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© 1989 Meena Alexander
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Alexander, M. (1989). Romantic Feminine. In: Women in Romanticism. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20257-7_2
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