Studies in Romanticism

ERINQ OZDEMIR Charlotte Smith’s Poetry as Sentimental Discourse I N THE FIELD OF ROMANTIC SCHOLARSHIP CHARLOTTE SMITH’S POETRY HAS in recent years come to be seen as one of the most paradigmatic literary sources revealing the artistic constructedness of gender. A lot of critical at­ tention has been paid to the gender roles and meanings inscribed in her po­ etry in ways that not only illuminate their textuality but also display how modern critics read gender into Romantic texts, thereby contributing to the ongoing revision of the established norms of canonicity and tradition. In addition to the influence she had on the first male Romantics, notably Wordsworth and Coleridge,1 Smith’s enormous importance for literary his­ tory and criticism today seems to lie chiefly in the deconstructive potential of her work as detected by scholars exploring the gendered and generic constructions of subjectivity and poetic identity in the Romantic lyric.2 Stuart Curran maintains that “Charlotte Smith was the first poet in Eng­ land whom in retrospect we would call Romantic.”3 It can be added that Smith is the major poet whose work reveals how deeply and inextricably the Romantic tradition is rooted in the sentimental. Embodying fusions and hybridizations ofwhat modern literary criticism has come to differenti­ ate as the sentimental and the Romantic traditions, Smith’s poetry not only illustrates their common ground, but also their differential qualities with respect to each other, which, considering their continuity, should perhaps be reassessed under the categories of the sentimental and the sublime. As This study was supported by The Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit of Akdeniz University. i. Carol Fry, Charlotte Smith (New York: Twayne, 1996), 14. 2. See, for instance,Jacqueline M. Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry, and the Cul­ ture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 9—11; Sarah Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 57, 61-63; Theresa M. Kelley, “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59 (2004): 286. 3. Stuart Curran, introduction to The Poems ofCharlotte Smith, ed. Curran (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), xix. All quotations from the poems are taken from this edition. SiR, 50 (Fall 2011) 437 438 ERINQ OZDEMIR Stephen Behrendt writes, “we might consider to what extent Romanticism might fruitfully be delineated by the ways in which writers and citizens alike position themselves, at various points in the period, in relation to an axis whose poles are the Sentimental and the Sublime.”4 Against some readings that interpret Smith’s poetic selfin terms ofan ab­ sence or failure, not only of the sublime but also of subjectivity, I would suggest that her poetry inscribes a poetic subjectivity that is more a positive writing ofthe sentimental than a default ofthe sublime. In his influential ar­ ticle “The I Altered” Curran writes with reference to the women poets of the Romantic period, including Smith: The humanitarianism of the Dissenting tradition makes women poets sympathetic to distress and victimization, but the void at the center of sensibility should alert us to a profound awareness among these poets of being themselves dispossessed, figured through details they do not control, uniting an unstructurable longing of sensibility with the hardearned sense of thingness. Curran’s comment seems to carry phenomenological and psycho-social meanings arbitrarily transposed onto the actual, aesthetic structure of the poetry, and my argument will be implicitly contesting this through the Bakhtinian notion of genre as a socio-aesthetic category.5 I will try to show that the consciousness of dispossession and “the longing of sensibility” in­ scribed especially in Elegiac Sonnets are deliberately and deftly structured mainly in accordance with the generic conventions of the literature of sen­ sibility. And the “sense of thingness” Curran attributes to Smith (along with other women poets of the period) cannot be located in her poetry in­ sofar as sensibility is a discursive mode ofsubjectivity, and even more funda­ mentally, insofar as all authorial discourse about the self in its relation to others and the world is an active enactment of subjectivity in the Bakhtinian sense. Karen Weisnran also attributes “thingness” to Smith’s poetic selfin her...