Poetry and the Late Novels: Fictions of Diffused Desire

Abstract

In the years after the publication of The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot was writing shorter poems and poetic dramas which allowed her to experiment further in her treatment of female roles. While the conventions of realistic fiction had generally confined her to plots of courtship and personal development, the form and subject matter of various poetic genres allowed Eliot to explore female aspiration in a series of new and different contexts. In 1869 alone, the year when she began work on Middlemarch, she wrote five poems, all of which in some way celebrate a transforming feminine power that is not entirely dependent on marriage. ‘Agatha’, a pastoral treatment of simple heroism along the lines of Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’, praises spinsterhood and singles out its nurturing role in the rural community. The poem celebrates a feminine power that is repeatedly and emphatically distinguished from the masculine. Just as in the opening lines the hilly maternal landscape displaces the reader’s presumed expectations of a paternal sublime ‘where rocks/Soar harsh above the troops of hurrying pines’, and just as Agatha’s habitation of Sanct Märgen follows that of the ‘Tall-frocked and cowled’ monks, so Agatha’s love is singled out as ‘willing but not omnipotent’ and therefore different from that of the ‘dread power’ holding sway over life and death.