Melancholy – Rage and Agitation.
There is a certain irony in the seeking of silence by those who were silenced and unacknowledged. There is also the proposition that not all women accepted this imposed invisibility but fought against it, motivated by a sense of injustice, driven by anger and frustration. In this chapter I intend to examine the validity of the claim that women appropriated melancholy as a means of acquiring a poetic voice equal to those of men. Did women use melancholy as an energiser and a vehicle for resistance? If this was the case to analyse how these views were expressed through poetry.
This analysis takes place on the understanding that there was a multiplicity of meanings for melancholy – aspects of listlessness, lack of concentration, difficulties in sleeping, mood swings, in the most extreme cases hallucinations. Alongside the conjuring of hyperactivity, increased sensory perception, heightened perception there were both threats and opportunities. This complex, shifting, contradictory condition, at times uplifting but often debilitating, an enhancement to the imagination and a source of dark psychological disturbance allowed for a multiplicity of responses, some overt, some subtle and nuanced. For women of this period there was always a struggle for recognition and respect as members of a male-dominated society and as poets. I would contend that this struggle both informed and created a distinctly feminine construct of melancholy designed to accommodate prevailing social, cultural, and medical attitudes. Features of this construct included the negotiation of boundaries in terms of language, a duality of voice – speaking for themselves on the one hand and to a mixed-gender readership on the other, often with measured intensity of emotion, unafraid of physicality – but always wary of accusations of irrationality. Black more (2011:67) has noted the seriousness of this threat:
Eighteenth-century melancholic off springs like the spleen and the vapors, hysteria and hypochondria not only bundled a wider range of symptoms and disorders together but were also gender-related constructs. In this process the female sex was increasingly pathologised and women were construed as (almost) predestined victims of melancholy.
Blackmore emphasises the use of derogatory language associated with medical definitions of melancholy, particularly the term hysteria – a label frequently attached to women when displaying emotions. She also acknowledges the trend towards broadening the scope of melancholy and an increasing medicalisation of the condition. Science and pseudo-science in this period sought to explain and in the case of women justify social constructs of the illness to their disparagement. Long held prejudices still held sway, a typical example illustrated by Thomas Sydenham (1695:417).‘Women are more frequently affected with this disease than men, because kind nature has given them a finer and more delicate constitution of the body, being designed for an easier life.’
What is striking about this quote is the sureness with which Sydenham writes.Hecondescends and trivialises women, but I would argue, also generates unforeseen consequences.As the century progressed theseattitudes were toinspire a first wave of feminism from a cohort of women who were becoming increasingly literate and educated. I contend that comments such as these began to be seen as provocations and triggered at the very least a sense of irritation, even anger that overcame some of the long embedded anxieties regarding a woman’s place in society and the literary world. This agitation was expressedthrough poetry in distinct and varied ways. It ranged from a fury against the ill-treatment of women in all of its worldly manifestations, to an assertion of the right to be valued as poets and writers. More than this, it was the cry of the unacknowledged and silenced.This response can is found in the poetry of such socially diverse individuals as Anne Finch, Mary Darby Robinson, and Mary Leapor. Ironically, Black more’s observation concerning the broadening of the scope of melancholy and increasingly acceptable forms of sensibility provided the opportunity for women to use melancholy as a means of asserting authority.
If Cheyne associated the English Malady with the upper-middle classes Mary Leapor inverts the social hierarchy in attempting to establish her identity as a poet and value as a human being. In many ways she is an outlier in that she worked as a kitchen maid. She was mostlyself-taught and died at the age of twenty-four before any of her poetry was published. Leapor’s background was very different from Finch and Carter. There could be no suggestion that her writings on melancholy were linked with idleness. However, there were points of connection. Leapor assumed the identity of ’Mira’, as Finch wrote as ‘Ardelia’. This persona enabled the parameters of the imagination to be stretched, creating a psychological distance between the poet and verse. It allowed for freer expression but also as a ‘double voice’ a dual identity. Also, like Finch and Carter, Leapor took pains to emphasise her knowledge of literature, in this case particularly Pope as a means of establishing herself as a serious poet and as an assertion of learning.These are to my mind actions of a defensive nature. It is a statement justifying the right to be creative on the basis that I am learned, my gender has not left me ignorant of the great works of literature. In Leapor’s case it is also a means of defending her lowly social position. It is another example of a guardedness creating differences in the approach to poetry between men and women.
In The Fields of Melancholy and Chearfulness,Leaporuses the double structure of melancholy and cheerfulness to construct a series of contradictions in keeping with the contradictory nature of melancholy. While the use of blank verse gives a conversational tone it begins in the third person.
Still were the Groves, and venerable Night
O’er half the Globe had cast her gloomy Veil,
When by Taper’s solitary Gleam
Sat musing Mira pensive and alone;
(lines 1-4)
Conventional motifs of solitude, night, loss, of gleams of light in the darkness are present. An image of seclusion is established at the beginning. There are contradictions between Mira’s aching loneliness and the pleasure of nocturnal solitude. The emotions are in flux, melancholy shifts and induce multiple sensations. Then the poem suddenly lurches from stillness into agitation.
Forgotten Woe, that for a time had slept,
Rose into Life, and like a Torrent pour’d
On her faint Soul, which sunk beneath its Rage:
At length soft Slumber kindly interven’d in Tears;
But restless Fancy that was walking still,
Led my deluded Spirit on the Wing
To pictur’d Regions and imagin’d Worlds.
(lines 8-15)
The approach of melancholy causes a flood of ‘Forgotten Woe’ a phrase cried out loud and attention shifts to Mira’s vulnerability. Her faint soul sinks, a restless fancy takes over. Here the paradoxes of melancholy are exerted. There is tranquillity and restlessness, delusion and insight. Painful recollections swirl and rage, threatening to overwhelm Mira. But ‘soft slumber kindly interven’d’ and she slept and dreamed. While melancholy enables tender memories to be forced into consciousness, a heightened imagination also offers a means of escape.
In stanza 2 Mira is projected to her ‘imagin’d World’.’ I seem’d transported to a gloomy land/ Whose fields had never known the cheerful Sun/ A heavy Mist hung in the frowning sky/ No feather’d Warblers chear’d the mourning Goves. There is an escape but only to a place of desolation. Personification in ‘chearful sun, frowning sky, mourning groves’, adds to the visionary qualities of this sequence and implies an inner turmoil.
As the poem progresses Mira is led by a nymph through dismal lands where ‘Here dwelt the Natives, (mournful as the place)’. This land has reflections of the Leapor’s life of hard work and drudgery. The poem is a comment on the gap between aspiration and the reality of lived experience. The dream is dense with black melancholy. When writing of the inhabitants she notes.
And each bewail’d the loss of something dear:
Some mourn’d a child that in its Bloom expir’d,
And some a Brother’s or a Parent’s Fate:
Lost Wealth and Honour many tongues deplor’d,
And some were wretched, tho’ they knew not why.
(lines 38-42)
The language of bewail’d, mourn’d, expir’d, deplor’d sets a dark tone of lamentation. Some were wretched tho’ ‘they knew not why’. Melancholy descends as a perplexing cloud.
Mira continues on her journey. She describes the landscape in increasingly angry terms, observing ‘cold horror’, ‘blasted trees’, ‘wounded souls’, ‘un wholsom winds.’ There is a sense not just of fear but of agitation and restlessness. Along the way she meets two maids – Dejection and Despair (whose garments by herself are torn), who are marked by wounds ‘that time can never heal’. Again,Leapor reflects on her position of servitude and by extension the restrictions placed upon all women. Garments ‘torn by Despair herself’ an act of deep frustration.The inability to escape from this melancholy land mirrors Leapor’spersonalsense of imprisonment. It is a cry against the limitations of her social position but also an articulation of a longing to establish a poetic identity. Themes of impediment and restriction I would argue are a feature of women’s melancholic writing. When in stanza 3 Mira escapes it is a physical revelation but also a dream.
At length the floating Clouds began to part,
And left behind them Streaks of cheerful Azure;
Our Path grew smooth and widen’d to the view,
Until it opened on a spacious Field;
A Field whose Charms no Painter e’er cou’d reach,
Though he shou’d borrow from the Poet’s heaven.
(lines 104-109)
The poem enters the ‘Field of Cheerfulness’ and the emphasis shifts from darkness and despair to light. The parting of the clouds, the azure sky, not only represents the revelation of the power and beauty of art and poetry but also the lifting of the veil of melancholy. Mira’s aspirations are realised, she is in ‘Poet’s heaven’. Instead of the maid’s Dejection and Despair there is Content, Innocence, Prosperity, Wealth and Health. It concludes with Mira waking from her sleep.
These were the Natives of this happy Land,
The Sight of whom so fill’d my glowing Breast
With Ecstasy that I awoke: And thus
Their Glories vanish’d and were seen no more.
(lines 170-173)
As the dream dispersed so the glories and ecstasy vanished. It was a dream because that is
all it could ever be. The summoning of melancholy as an aid to the muse is ultimately futile.
Aspirations of literary achievement no more than a pleasant reverie. Much of Leapor’s poetry has a thread of resolvability running through it, an ambiguity and resignation that also applies to the work of other women writers. This too is a characteristic of a feminine perspective on melancholy.
Black more (2011: 75) affirms these conclusions.
Yet at the end of the poem it becomes clear that it is melancholy and not mirth which leaves her imprint on the speaker, since the persona has to realise that cheerfulness, her court and her glories vanished and were no more.
Black more recognises that Leapor’s melancholy is embedded in the restrictions of her everyday life, that the joys of poetry are attainable only through dreams and wishful thinking. There is a quiet seething at the delusional quality of the ‘Field of Chearfulness’. The ‘Field of Melancholy’ more accurately mirrors her real existence but finally an acceptance of this experience assituated in reality.
Mary Leapor’s appropriation of melancholy is complex. The poem displays a split identity reflecting her dual status as maid and poet. There are different speaking voices and oscillations between melancholy and cheerfulness, light and dark, which infuse the lines with linguistic agitation and suggest tensions within Leapor’s thought processes.
In terms of social standing Mary Darby Robinson (1757-1800) was very different. She was a well-known actress, dramatist and courtesan- a background which instilled confidence and an awareness of audience. She was very clear in her views concerning the inequalities between men and women as recorded in her A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Men’s Subordination (1799: 3).
In order that this letter may be clearly understood, I shall proceed to prove my assertion in the strongest, but most undecorated language. I shall remind my enlightened country – women that they are not the mere appendages of domestic life, but the partners, the equal associates of men and, where they excel in intellectual powers, they are no less capable of all that prejudice and customs have united in attributing exclusively to the thinking faculties of men. I argue thus, and my assertions are incontrovertible.
Robinson is playing to the expectations of her public persona, being deliberately
provocative. But I also believe these opinions sincerely held. There is anger and frustration expressed, which is advanced in the following exclamation.‘Let me ask this plain and rational question – is not a woman a human being, gifted with all the feelings that inhabit the bosom of a man.’ Robinson (1799:8)
The assertion that the feelings of women are equivalent to those of men is revealed in her appropriation of melancholy as a means of establishing a distinct poetic identity. It has already been stated that perceptions of melancholy were gendered at this time. This anger is evident in Ode to Melancholy and Ode to Despair where melancholy is not only appropriated as a means of identification as a poet but also as a coded message for feminine subjugation and oppression. It begins withthe poet’s voice addressing melancholy directly as a sorc’ress and despot.
SORC’RESS of the Cave profound!
Hence, with thy pale, and meagre train,
Nor dare my roseate bow’r profane,
Where light-heel’d mirth despotic reigns,
Slightly bound in feath’ry chains,
And scatt’ring blisses round.
(lines 1-6)
Immediately the issue of bewitchment and duplicity is emphasised but also the language of
confinement in ‘despotic reigns’ and ‘feath’ry chains’. Like Leapor there are motifs of restriction and the desire to be released – to fulfil a potential restrained by masculine impediments. The conjuring of a sorc’ress could be construed as collaborating with male perceptions of the beguiling ways of women. That Darby feels able to use this image is a testament to her confidence and theatrical background. Here melancholy has a feminine personaand snares the vulnerable.
These images are extended in stanza 2.
Shackled by thy numbing spell,
Mis’ry’s pallid children dwell;
Where, brooding o’er thy fatal charms,
FRENZY rools the vacant eye;
Where hopeless LOVE, with folded arms,
Drops the tear, and heaves the sigh;
Till cherish’d passion’s tyrant sway
Chills the warm pulse of Youth, with premature decay.
(lines 19 – 26)
There are still references to spells and charms but again, entrapment with the use of ‘shackled’ and ‘tyrant’. Melancholy here has a malign supernatural quality. It is not summoned but breaks over the sufferer. In the next stanza the reader is taken further into realms of ‘Haunted Tow’r’s, ravens, ‘sounds of morbid melancholy’ and ‘the gloom of the night’ where the warm pulse of youth is chilled by premature decay. The sense of tension rises and the tone pitches into frenzy and agitation.
Or, beside the Murd’rer’s bed,
From they dark and morbid wing,
O’er his fev’rish, burning head,
Drops of conscious anguish fling;
While freezing HORROR’s direful scream,
Rouses his guilty soul from kind oblivion’s dream.
(lines 33-38)
Robinson acknowledges that melancholy can lead to dark places, that it can take the guise of a winged beast and murderer. She understands that the condition causes psychological disturbance and disorientation through the use of ‘fev’rish’ ‘burning’ ‘anguish’ ‘direful’. But this is only a reflection of realities in the real world. This torment mirrors the fetters imposed on women by a male-dominated society. Robinson writes with an individual voice. She appropriates melancholy as a vehicle for expressing her anxieties but also her anger. In the final stanza this culminates in a statement of defiance. A conviction that she will not be defeated.
HATED IMP, I brave thy Spell,
REASON shun’s thy barb’roussway;
Life, with mirth should glide away,
Despondency, with guilt should dwell;
For conscious TRUTH’s unruffled mien,
Displays the dauntless Eye, and patient smile serene.
(lines 53-58)
The poet’s voice resolves to defeat despondency by truth and patience. In this way the poet is unshackled and gains greater freedom of expression. The contradictory and shifting nature of melancholy is still evident. On the one hand demotivating but on the other a stimulus to frantic activity. Ode to Melancholy bristles with barely suppressed resentment but this also I suggest,masks deep-rooted anxiety. There is a sense that Robinson is projecting an image of strength which in itself is a kind of defensiveness. There are times such as line 35 with phrases like ‘fev’rish burning head’ and ‘direful scream’ where Robinson exhibits the hallmarks of hysteria so often levelled at women poets. Yet she ends, in the final line, quite deliberately in my view, with a ‘dauntless eye’ and ‘patient smile serene’. This is the mask of an actress.
Robinson’s social standing as an actress and courtesan in a sense gave freedom to express herself more freely. The bonds of respectability which held poets such as Carter and Singer Rowe did not so rigorously apply. Her background also gave the advantage of audience awareness and self-promotion. I feel she used these advantages to acquire melancholy as a means of making a statement about her value as a poet and human being. This links with the views of Ingram (2011:44).
Although it has been argued that women have traditionally been excluded from the masculine model of melancholy, more recent investigations by critics… have shown that women actively sought to appropriate the possibilities of melancholy as a means of authenticating creative abilities., and indeed, the act of creation itself.
Mary Darby Robinson illustrates this point. The crux of the argument is that a distinctly feminine configuration of melancholy evolved, expressed by women poets in different ways and from different social perspectives. The articulation ofmelancholy through verse came as a rejoinder to individual ambition, creativity, and a desire for recognition on many levels. Poetry was produced in response to social and cultural restrictions imposed upon them and as a result displayed a certain wariness, a duality even if, as in this case the second voice was hidden, but also emotional intensity.
Robinsons Ode to Despair, returns to many of the themes pursued in Ode to Melancholy. It begins:
TERRIFIC FIEND! Thou Monster fell,
Condemn’d in haunts profane to dwell,
Why quit thy solitary Home,
O’er wide Creation’s paths to roam?
Pale Tyrant of the timid Heart,
Whose visionary spells can bind
The strongest passions of the mind,
Freezing Life’s current with thy baneful Art.
(lines 1-8)
The presentation of despair as all-consuming, as a monster and tyrant is similar to Ode to
Melancholy but is expressed with great drama. It is staged with ‘visionary spells’ and ‘the strongest passions.’ These images are further developed in stanza 3.
Insulted HEAV’N consign’d thy brand
To the first Murd’rer’s crimson hand
Swift o’er the earth the Monster flew,
And round th’ ensanguin’d Poisons threw.
(lines 27-30)
There are theatrical elements to the description of despair as a murderer, as a monster
dispensing poison over the earth. The suggestion that no one is immune from its effects. The idea of despair as a disease is extended in the next stanza utilising the vocabulary of ‘contagion’, ‘loathsome cells’, ‘poisons damp’ and again motifs of imprisonment in ‘pond’rous chains’, ‘pestilential caves entomb’d’. The impression of the suffocating nature of despair is emphasised in that it causes VALOUR, GENIUS, TASTE and WORTH to be smothered. Despair is a source of suffocation, the causes of despair a lack of respect, of opportunity, of subjugation.
In contrast to Ode to Melancholy the poem ends not with bold defiance but a quiet warning.
But come not near my calm retreat,
Where Peace and HOLY friendship meet;
Where SCIENCE sheds a gentle ray,
And guiltless Mirth beguiles the day,
Where Bliss congenial to the MUSE
Shall round my heart her sweets diffuse,
Where, from each restless Passion free,
I give my noiseless hours, BLESS’D POETRY, TO THEE.
(lines 111-118)
Ode to Despair ends with a statement that the poet has both sanctuary and control sufficient to dispel despair and its associations, and to concentrate on the muse. She is undefeated.
Charlotte Smith (1749 – 1806) was another writer where melancholy infused the narratives of her poetry. This was particularly true of her elegiac sonnets.Spacks has pointed out:
Charlotte Smith faced much criticism for her almost entirely melancholic tone; she justified herself autobiographically, claiming that her personal misery kept her from adopting anything but a gloomy voice in her writing’. (Spacks 2009:207)
Smith’s life was troubled, often tragic and included time spent in a debtor’s prison. As with Leapor, Robinson, and Singer Rowe, personal experience infused her verse. The point is that women’s experience was different frommen’s and this too is reflected in the poetry. Smith’s elegiac sonnets utilise these personal insights as a vehicle for the exploration of melancholy. It has been remarked by Thier felder (2005:34) that these sonnets also represented an angry rebuke at the treatment of women at the hands of men.
Nearly all of Charlotte Smith’s remarkable sonnets – many set during the symbolic nightmare of social darkness or out in the raging weather of political and religious dialectic- contain images and ideas that can be seen as the intoned not just by one narrator, but by all women living in the throes of a patriarchal system that would ultimately work to keep them in their proper place.
While this may be true of Smith’s novel’s and biographical writing there is no evidence of this stance in the sonnets. Instead the sonnets are marked by artistic weariness and the connection of melancholy with a finely attuned observation of the natural landscape.
The first sonnet The Partial Muse has shades of bitterness, but this is directed against the demands of the muse. It begins:
The partial Muse has from my earliest hours
Smiled on the rugged path I’m doomed to tread
And still with sportive hand has snatch’dwild flowers,
To weave fantastic garlands for my head.
(lines 1 -4)
The connotations of ‘rugged path’ and ‘doomed to tread’ reflects the weariness of artistic creativity but also the rewards.There are contradictions in the sense that ‘fantastic garlands ‘are a gift of the muse’ – that the snatching of wild flowers is an appreciation that inspiration comes from the natural world. The tone then changes.
But far far happier is the lot of those
Who never learn’d her dear delusive art;
Which while it decks the head with many a rose,
Reserves the thorn to fester in the heart.
(lines 5-8)
The paradoxes of melancholy are exposed. It is a gift (decks the head with many a rose), but also a wound – the tear in the heart. The final cost is illuminated in the final lines.
Of mourning Friendship, or unhappy Love,
Ah! Then, how dear the Muse’s favours cost,
If those pains sorrow best – who feel it most!
(lines12 – 14)
In this sonnet Smith claims melancholy and her poetic identity not in a storm of rage and anger but as a right due to her suffering and sorrow. She insists that unhappiness is necessary to fulfil her destiny as a poet – there is agitation, and dissonance, almost alienation from others who are not in the power of the muse but it is expressed in a very different way to Mary Darby Robinson. Melancholy is not opposed as a fiend, a monster, a murderer. There is no association with contagion or poison or pestilence. For Smith, who in reality experienced genuine imprisonment the chains of melancholy are of the heart and mind and self-imposed. But this imprisonment also leads to a kind of liberation. The oppressive nature of melancholy opens the eyes to the landscape and the natural world- allows for deeper insights.
The Partial Muse is significant because as Backscheider (2005:328) puts it:
Through this sonnet Smith claims her place as a poet by her birth, therefore destiny, and by her sensibility, her understanding of suffering, her ‘pity’ and her own difficulties.
Smith’s turmoil is imposed by the machinations of a dangerous and unjust world but processed through the intellect. There is no attunement with the body, no outpouring of visceral emotion, rather an exercise in perceptive reasoning. However, this in itself is a retreat, a different kind of escape into the realm of the imagination. The Partial Muse displays defensiveness in the form of a justification of her right to be a poet. This too is an illustration of the diversity of the individual poet’s voice, the different ways in which agitation, rage, anger is both experienced and expressed through the medium of poetry.
Finally, in Anne Finch’s The Spleen motifs of detention addressed by Smith and Robinson also appear. She is captured by melancholy just when she thought she had defeated it. There is quiet desperation in these lines, lines delivered with potent restraint.
Till, thinking thee to have catched, himself by thee was caught,
Retained thy prisoner, thy acknowledged slave,
And sunk beneath thy chain to a lamented grave.
(lines 147-49)
These lines speak of resignation. The incorporation of ‘retained’ ‘acknowledged slave’
‘sunk’, recognises the only resolution is to accede to the forces of melancholy and by
extension the pressures of a male-dominated society. An underlying sense of bafflement
challenges the rational instincts of the poet’s voice. But this voice is still heard in the act of
of creation – a claim is still made.
In The Spleen responses shift and merge revealing turbulent mobility. From the opening question. ‘What art thou, Spleen, which everything dost ape?’ To the ‘dashing on rocks’, to the ‘calm of stupid discontent’ the poem condemns those who presume to acquire the spleen for reasons of fashion, by so doing trivialising the condition. She sees this as an act of collaboration.
The fool, to imitate the wits,
Complains of thy pretended fits,
And dullness, born with him, would lay
upon thy accidental sway;
(lines 63- 66)
There are laments upon unsympathetic husbands, the ineffectiveness of wine, music, and physicians in keeping the spleen at bay. This is not the tranquillity of melancholy but an arena of attrition.
Rage, agitation, and the inner turmoil of melancholy are expressed in different ways by Mary Leapor, Charlotte Smith, Mary Darby Robinson and Anne Finch. Melancholy is seized as a justification for creativity, as a way of processing perplexity, as a means of reacting against unfairness or disregard. What unites their poetry is an awareness of constraint, of imposed expectations. To escape these restrictions, they have to negotiate a path to acceptability. This might include adopting a poetic persona, masking true feelings – a kind of double voice, utilising feminine emotions within boundaries which move with time and social standing. It is this negotiation which differentiates the configuration of melancholy between men and women.