Hemans’s Record of Dante: “The Maremma” and the Intertextual Poetics of Plenitude

Abstract

In the autumn of 1827, the American artist William E. West visited Felicia Hemans at her home in Rhyllon, North Wales, and painted three portraits of the popular poet at the request of Alaric Watts, the editor of the Literary Souvenir. One of them, later to be used as a frontispiece engraving in the 1839 Memoirs of the poet by her sister, represents a woman with elegantly curled hair covered by a white veil, a high-waisted dress with puffed upper sleeves and gauze lower sleeves, and a narrow waist restrained by a plain belt. Reclining on a scroll-ended arm rest, Hemans appears to be dressed in some generic contemporary, late-Romantic or early-Victorian, style. The overall effect, however, recalls the Italian Renaissance.¹ If this is undoubtedly appropriate for the author of The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816) and The Vespers of Palermo (1823), still, this image of the poet (almost) in masquerade also conjures up a scenario of cross-cultural interference. Hemans’s attire follows contemporary fashion, but, in keeping with the eclecticism of Regency style, it also sports an exotic air that partly distances her from a specifically English or British figurative canon. Presenting her as visually and culturally ambiguous, the engraved portrait posits Hemans as an intercultural subject.