For Romantic women writers the paratext itself is essentially a masculine literary space affiliated with established writing practices; however, this paper suggests that Charlotte Turner Smith’s mode of discourse in her use of notes and their relation to the text proper are never fixed in her contemplative blank-verse long poem, Beachy Head (1807). Even though the display of learning in the paratext partly supports the woman writer’s claim to authority, this paper argues that Smith’s endnotes also indicate her way of challenging the double bind for women writers, summoning masculine authority on the margins of her book while simultaneously interrogating essentialist thinking and instructions about one’s identity in a culture and on the printed page. The poem shows how the fringes of the book can be effectively transformed from a masculine site of authority to an increasingly feminized site of interchange as Smith writes with an awareness of patriarchal, imperial abuses of power in that area of the book. There is a persistent transgression of cultural/textual boundaries occurring in Beachy Head, which explores the very scene and languages of imperial encounter. Accordingly, if Wordsworth’s theory of composition suggests a subjective and abstract poetic experience—an experience without mediation—in which its medium’s purpose seems to be to disappear from the reader’s consciousness, an examination of the alternative discourse of self-exposure in Smith’s poem reveals the essentially fluid nature of media-consciousness in the Romantic era, which remains little acknowledged in received accounts of Romantic literary culture.
This paper discusses the significance of the materiality of text in
1See Mellor; Wilson and Haefner; Feldman and Kelley; McGann; Behrendt; Trilling; Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality; and Hoagwood and Ledbetter. 2Stuart Curran’s The Poems of Charlotte Smith (1993). References to Smith’s poetry are to this edition. My references to the text proper in particular areincluded in the text by line numbers, while an “n” is attached to a page reference number to refer to an authorial note on that page. Smith’s notes were originally attached to the end of the volume but reprinted in this edition as footnotes.
II. The Public Figure of Smith and the Autobiographical Impulse
With the revival of scholarly interest in Charlotte Smith and other Romantic women writers in the early 1990s,3 modern readers began to explore how gender and poetic identity constitute a productive sphere of conflict within the poetics of loss and self-fashioning that Smith forged and Wordsworth, one of her greatest admirers, soon took up in
Given the cult of Charlotte Smith’s public figure and her appealing self-portrait in the widely successful
3The renewal of critical interest in Smith has been enriched by Curran’s “The ‘I’ Altered” and his modern edition of Smith’s poetry; Fletcher’s Critical Biography; and Stanton’s Collected Letters. For discussions about the historical reception of Smith and other women Romantics, see Linkin; Linkin and Behrendt; and Newlyn. 4See Romanticism, Lyricism, and History 51-72. See also Hunt and Hoagwood, who track the record of Wordsworth’s verbal, metrical and thematic echoes of Smith. 55We haven’t seen yet any book-length study of the publishing history of Smith’s poetry. For shorter accounts of the versions of Smith’s poetic volumes and their current textual status, see Labbe’s headnotes in her recent edition of Smith’s poems; see also Curran’s textual notes in his standard scholarly edition of Smith’s poems. 6Hoagwood offers a succinct outline of the contemporary tradition of “enveloping [Smith’s] work with a morose concentration on her miserable life” (142). For another discussion of the issue, see Zimmerman, “‘Dost thou not know my voice?’” 7Review of Elegiac Sonnets, Critical Review 61 (1786): 467-68. 8Review of The Emigrants, British Critic 1 (1793): 405; Review of Beachy Head, with Other Poems, British Critic 30 (1807): 171. In The Emigrants, Smith’s earlier blank-verse poem in two books, the author meticulously balances the poem’s political elements with a poetics of sorrow familiar to her readers from the Sonnets. 9Review of Beachy Head, with Other Poems, Universal Magazine 7 (1807): 229. 10Review of Beachy Head, with Other Poems, Monthly Review 56 (1808): 99. 11Review of Elegiac Sonnets, Critical Review 61 (1786): 468.
III. Audience, Rhetorical Situation, and the Publishing Context of Beachy Head
My discussion of a shift in the textual politics of Smith’s autobiographical appeal is manifold, and I want to address the matter, first, in terms of the changes in Smith’s own understanding of her audience, and in the ideological constraints on the production of the
With the potentially inflammatory elements in her literary self-defense Smith’s public image was facing a drastically different political situation in the year 1793 and afterwards: a period affected by the September Massacres of 1792, the execution of the French king in January 1793, followed by France’s declaration of war on Britain in February, and the more tangible risks in Britain associated with the Seditious Libel Act, published in May 1792. Smith’s carefully nuanced portrayal of the French emigrants and her equally meticulous embedding of personal and literary imagery in
The
Despite her desire to make more money with the new poems by relying on the success of her earlier volumes of the
12Stanton discusses what she calls, quoting the poet, Smith’s “literary business,” i.e., Smith’s close involvement in the processes of her literary production. Zimmerman also offers a convincing account of how well Smith herself understood the nature of “her readers’ receptivity to her solitary poet,” and thereby crafted the Elegiac Sonnets volume to make the most of the market for her dejected speaker (“‘Dost thou not know my voice?’” 112). 13Labbe’s headnote to the volume in her 2007 edition of Smith’s poetry, 149. 14For a discussion of how Smith’s financial predicament was particularly acute at this time, see Fletcher 321. 15Letter to Thomas Cadell, Jr. and William Davies, July 12, 1806, cited from The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith 741. References by page number to this edition of Smith’s letters, cited as SL, are hereafter included in the text. Unless otherwise noted, italics are mine.
IV. Paratext and Cultural Boundaries: The Textual Politics of IV. Beachy Head
The rediscovered Romantic poetess carries out the task of narrating a scene of gender and cultural conflicts by effectively splitting her book into a proper text and what Gérard Genette calls “paratext”—a “fringe” of the printed text, which in effect situates the text and suggests an interpretive frame.16 For example,
Smith’s preoccupation with paratextual practice is central to her poetic experiment in
Gender and the poetics of self-fashioning provide a measure of the poem’s apparent achievement as Smith’s rhetorical craft in
Of Charlotte Smith’s two long narrative poems (the other being
Smith’s copious endnotes in
In the opening stanza, for example, Smith presents Beachy Head as a natural habitat of many species of wild birds recorded in southern England. Attaching descriptive notes in which she catalogues the binomial name of each species in Latin, she identifies the genus to which the species belongs, and the species within the genus: “Terns.
Despite the impersonal tone of her notes explaining the “gray choughs” and other indigenous species of birds, the figurative language of the text proper helps us read Smith’s criminal and punitive metaphors as a sign of her social commentary on her country’s bigoted hostility to France at the present time. These lines provide additional political meanings, too, to both the opening emphasis on the “awful hour / Of vast concussion” (5-6) and a vision of a glorious sunrise over the English Channel described in the succeeding lines, since the sunrise — an icon of revolutionary hope—is marked by a picturesque mode of description and the conventional night-light symbolism, both of which in this case effectively reinforce the socialized senses of the nature-culture opposition highlighted in the opening stanza.
Landscapes and material culture furnish Smith with symbolic imagery, with which she projects her socio-political radicalism. Given British government’s repression of seditious statements published on its own territory during the revolutionary decades, Smith’s democratic contentions against slavery in lines 41-68 are embedded understandably in a figurative language, in a particularly Romantic engagement with the sensitive appreciation of nature watched impressively on top of Beachy Head. A magnificent prospect of the English Channel at midday is starkly juxtaposed here with the image of a “ship of commerce richly freighted,” a ship engaged in Britain’s cotton trade with “the orient climates,” presumably India, the East or West Indies (42-44). This image of British imperial expansion is closely followed by Smith’s repulsion to her country’s involvement in the enslavement of men in exchange for cotton and jewels: “The beamy adamant, and the round pearl / Enchased in rugged covering; which the slave, / With perilous and breathless toil, tears off / From the rough sea-rock, deep beneath the waves” (50-54).
Smith’s “abhorrence” of her country’s cruelty and inhumanity to “fellow man” is important (57, 59), but here I want to pay particular attention to the roles of authorial notes in her comment on the problem of cultural dominance. After she has appended a note to line 47, explaining a species of cotton (“
Renowned as a material with superlative physical qualities and optical characteristics, diamond, combined with efficient marketing, constitutes one of the most valuable commodities that have attracted miners, industrialists, imperial governors, and military men like Robert Percival. And Percival’s
16Genette draws attention to those elements of a book that constitute the socalled “periphery” of the printed page, a space between text and “off-text,” such as a book’s cover, dedication, title, preface, introductory letters, notes, epigraph, advertisement, and so forth. Though the intermediate area of a book is typically considered marginal to the meaning of the text, Genette suggests that these materials are crucial to our appreciation of the literary work as a social construct. Unlike the common view of the matters as merely representative of “transitional” spaces in the book, Genette sees paratexts as indicative of transaction as these materials are often added during the book’s distribution process by the editor, the printer, and the publisher, as well as its author(s) (1-2). Genette’s study effectively creates a discursive space in which we might examine the “negotiation” between the institutions of publishing and individual authors, which enables a text to become a book and finally offers it as such to its reader. 17Review of Beachy Head,with Other Poems, Literary Panorama 2 (1807): 294. 18See Culture of Gender 3-9. 19For discussions about the ways in which British and other European accounts of tropical agriculture and landscapes worked as one of the ideological apparatuses of empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Tobin; de Almeida and Gilpin; and Pratt.
V. Multi-Vocality and Social Vision
Complicating the relationship between the text proper and the notes, the poem contains dramatic reversals, too, in the narrative’s trajectory. A striking example can be found in the contrasting messages offered by the poem’s first two speakers: the initial “I” and “Contemplation.” When the initial “I” describes a sunset’s unique atmospheric conditions and intense colors, this speaker uses the magnificent visual rhetoric to call attention to the English nobility’s “poor” fetish for jewels (71), while this radical social comment is starkly juxtaposed later with Contemplation’s essentially nationalist and militant call for actions to regain England’s “naval fame” against “foreign arms,” especially France in this case (145, 157). Despite its disposition toward epic eloquence in dealing with the military history of England’s south coast, Contemplation assumes its own form of authority as the long note (222n) devoted to an account of the Norman invasions since the eighth century supplies detailed historical information from the margins.
Seemingly impersonal in his prose, gauging the note-speaker’s ideological orientation is tricky, though, as his account of the “North-men” (222n) on the distant coasts of France, Italy and England is invested ultimately in providing support for Contemplation’s patriotic account of England’s south-coast defense against foreign powers in the past and then; when the note-speaker is engaged ironically in representing what Contemplation calls the northern “invaders” (125) as a race of valor and dignity, who drove a group of Muslims off the shores of a town in Italy “notwithstanding the inequality of their numbers” and still declining “every reward” from the natives (222n), the subtle shift in the notespeaker’s intrinsic viewpoint facilitates Contemplation’s retelling of the story of the Norman conquest of England in lines 131-153 from William the Conqueror’s peculiarly
And when, musing on the history of south-coast invasions from the Vikings to the Normans, Contemplation refers to an impending invasion from France (“modern Gallia” 143) and to the Italian and Spanish responses to the Napoleonic war, this discourse of strife and feudal ruins involves not an individualistic or nostalgic preoccupation with “the proudest roll” of English monarchs or the turbulent years of the region’s past (167), but rather a uniquely metaphoric vision of England’s current public unease about societal and historical change attendant on the revolution and its aftermath. Therefore, the productively complex interaction between Smith’s speakers, and the figurative and poetic projection of her views on pressing social issues constitute a crucial feature of Smith’s historical discourse, which contrasts strikingly with White’s idea of the fossilized past or his primarily ecological respect for the natural world of south east England. Smith’s account of the regional environment contrasts, too, with Percival’s interest in tropical nature’s potential for agricultural productivity.
Adding to the disagreement between the political awareness of the initial “I” and Contemplation, the poem takes a further turn when Contemplation is replaced by “the reflecting mind,” whose persona dominates the next 114 lines until the reintroduction of the “I.” The reflecting mind cheerfully recoils “From even the proudest roll [which is] by glory fill’d” and “returns / To simple scenes of peace and industry” (167-69). Interestingly, the reflecting mind’s uniquely poetic voice here is marked by a note of irony when its reference to “the proudest roll” alludes to the images of the book (of national history) highlighted earlier in Contemplation’s proud and affected account of England’s past resistance to foreign nations on its own southern coast: “Contemplation here, / High on her throne of rock, aloof may sit, / And bid recording Memory unfold / Her
Given the linguistic acuteness characteristic of the reflecting mind’s seemingly lyric persona the speaker’s panoramic overview of the “simple scenes of peace and industry,” delivered in a deceptively personal manner in lines 167-281, involves not an individualistic meditation on a rural life and private sorrows, but rather Smith’s imaginative treatment of social and cultural unrest during the Napoleonic wars, showing her persistent use of the landscape and natural imagery as political icons. The reflecting mind starts with an otherwise picturesque account of a “lone farm” quietly “bosom’d in some valley of the hills” (170-71), but the mind quickly distinguishes this vision of pastoral beauty as secretly involving war and public disorder, with an ordinary shepherd surprisingly engaged in smuggling, “Quitting for this / Clandestine traffic his more honest toil” (182-83). The socialized messages of this suspicious landscape become more prominent when the mind and the note-speaker (225n) univocally highlight the discontents and anxieties of the working class living on Beachy Head; the speakers jointly develop the idea of the ordinary shepherds and laborers of the Sussex coast as victims of current political turmoil, who are led to abandon “what the earth affords / To human labour” and instead to “hazard their lives to elude the watchfulness of the Revenue officers, and to secure their cargoes” (191-92, 225n). The unusual combination of voices toward a common goal contributes to the effect of portraying the ordinary men’s engagement in “the perilous trade” in a compassionate light (188), presenting the problem as essentially a matter of human suffering under the political climate, rather than a personal moral issue. Smith thus interprets coastal landscape as a site deeply involved with social changes, suggesting Beachy Head’s symbolic situation in the contemporary political scene. Furthermore, the reflecting mind’s somber meditation on the human “commerce of destruction” nicely parallels the poem’s opening emphasis on the “ship of commerce” (42), a seascape watched on top of Beachy Head and associated with Britain’s imperial identity and thus with Smith’s anti-slavery argument. The recurrent trope of transaction jointly involves the issues of class and race as Smith links the suffering of the natives of England’s southern coast to that of a colonial slave in India, who “With perilous and breathless toil, tears off [pearl oysters] / From the rough sea-rock, deep beneath the waves” (53-54).
The poem’s tone becomes increasingly confessional as the “I” appears again in line 282 and directly addresses reader in the first-person, reflecting on his own peaceful childhood, youth and other personal experiences. This portion of the poem appears to develop an unusually intimate relationship between the “I” and the reader partly through the speaker’s brief reference to his experience of “A guiltless exile” in line 288, which some readers have taken literally as an allusion to a distressing event of Smith’s married life.21 However, the speaker’s sense of unhappiness must not be construed too narrowly on a personal level, since Smith uses her speaker’s love of Nature (“An early worshipper at Nature’s shrine, / I loved her rudest scenes”) to show her engagement with issues of public concern (346-47). For example, when the contemplative speaker invokes the images of a happy, but ignorant, rural boy whose martial fantasies “[Have] led him on, till he has given up / His freedom” to find only misery “While yet a stripling” (280-81, 279), the imagined prospect of pastoral beauty embeds a stark Blakean contrast between the innocent and experienced states of human lives. A similar treatment of England’s social reality is involved in the speaker’s recollection of his own younger self looking down on “the sturdy hind” toiling with his “panting team” of oxen up “the hollow way” (307, 308, 305). This hilltop vision conveys Smith’s acute social awareness, presenting the surrounding view as a site free from the destructive forces of social evils, such as “illegal acts”(211), “hostile war-fires” (228), greed (“frequently the child of Luxury /Enjoying nothing, flies from place to place / In chase of pleasure” 245-47), and even London’s polluted atmosphere (“the polluted smoky atmosphere / And dark and stifling streets” 291-92).
20As a long note details on the boundary of the page (224n), the latter event refers to the defeat of Beachy Head, which the Allied forces of the English and Dutch allowed earlier to Admiral Tourville’s 1690 French fleet on the coast of England. 21Labbe, for example, has claimed that the “I” represents “the familiar figure of ‘Charlotte Smith,’ sorrowful and needy,” taking the phrase as a direct reference to Smith’s own enforced residence in France during the 1780s, a period Smith was seeking shelter from her husband’s numerous creditors (148).
VI. The Problem of Authority and the Rhetoric of Science
The poem’s consistent emphasis on the language of science supplements the effect of Smith’s detachment from the language of subjectivity she once employed in her earlier collections of elegiac self-fashioning. The “I” who meditates on “Science’ [
In this explanatory note the reader is provided, first, with two different speculations about the elephant’s bones: that of the Reverend Langrish tracing the origin of the bones as far back as to the time of the biblical Flood, and another pointing to the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43, an idea relying on the authority of the Roman historian Cassius and the English poet Milton. Second, there is a piece of counter-evidence found in North America, which tends to disprove both previous claims. Taken as a whole, attentive readers may see that the note-speaker has presented the archaeological findings as a matter of dispute, placing those “learned” explanations side by side that are widely different in the space, time, and motives they associate with truth.22
Interestingly, the long note concerning the authoritative accounts of the bones at Burton is followed by another, which supports the main text’s brief allusion to a folkloric account of the relation between the bones and the visible features of the South Downs:
By showing how the bony remnant of the past is described differently in popular oral myths of the region, Smith represents the contrasting rhetoric of expertise as an almost closed system of discourse posing a threat to the discourse of oral history and fables. She indicates the failures of scientific discourse to explain the profound human condition in the rural area of south England in a social, cultural and linguistic context. Furthermore, given Smith’s paratextual investment in showing the discrepancy between the accepted accounts of the matter, the poem brings the very idea of scientific or spiritual
22The note’s inquiry into the rhetoric of expertise evokes a twentieth-century conversation on the rhetorical motives for scientific discourse. See Burke, and Gross.
VII. The Poem in Its “Place” and the Materiality of the Text
The trope of the material text plays a pivotal role on the level of the individual poem, too, as
With all the marks of disparity, cross reference, juxtaposition, reversal, slippage and self-mockery consistently inscribed in the narrative, I see Smith’s characteristically multi-vocal self-fashioning in
23For discussions of the relationship between female writing, Romantic botanical interests and historiography, see Pascoe, “Female Botanists”; Ruwe; and Kelley. 24For example, see SL 741 for a letter Smith sent to Johnson on July 12, 1806. 25On the intertextuality and order of Romantic poetic volumes, see Stillinger’s Hoodwinking 1-13 and 116-17; and Fraistat. 26For a detailed account of the development of the collection, see Labbe’s headnote to the volume in her edition of Smith’s poetry.
While the Romantic desire for immediacy is apparent in the triumph of Wordsworth’s theorization of the poetic process as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” in the Preface to
Smith’s preoccupation with print apparatuses and discursive modes highlights her awareness of the material and ideological constraints on her own literary production, showing her contemplation on the complicated nature of a woman author’s relationship to her communication media and print culture.
27Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) is arguably the most important critical essay of the Romantic period for its bold cultural statement and political radicalism. Indeed, the Preface signals a revolution in literary history, proposing a new expressive model of poetry in which it is, in the end, not language (whether metrical or prosaic) that matters but in fact the human mind which, with its “inherent and indestructible qualities,” functions as the only medium free of distortion (747); and here we see the grand Romantic illusion of unmediated transmission. With his theory of poetic immediacy Wordsworth imagines a state in which the marking of mediation in one’s writing becomes untraceable — thereby an illusion of poetic experiences in which the form of poetry itself becomes paradoxically unnecessary. For discussions of the contradictions inherent in the Romantic ideology of solitary authorship that literary (re)production is dependent on the activity of a mind, see Bennett 64; Langan and McLane; and Stillinger, Solitary Genius.