Sappho's Heartfelt Laments: A Poetic Journey of Love and Loss

1. Introduction

2. Mary Robinson (1757?-1800), Sappho and Phaon 24 O THOU! meek Orb! that stealing o'er the dale Cheer'st with thy modest beams the noon of night! On the smooth lake diffusing silv'ry light, Sublimely still, and beautifully pale! What can thy cool and placid eye avail, Where fierce despair absorbs the mental sight, While inbred glooms the vagrant thoughts invite, To tempt the gulph where howling fiends assail? O, Night! all nature owns thy temper'dpow'r; Thy solemn pause, thy dews, thy pensive beam; Thy sweet breath whisp'ring the moonlight bow'r, While fainting flow'rets kiss the wand'ring stream! Yet, vain is ev'ry charm! and vain the hour, That brings to madd'ning love, no soothing dream! (1796)

3. from Ovid’s (43 BCE–17 CE) Heroides (19 BCE?)Alexander Pope’s translation (1707/1712) 1 Say, lovely youth, that dost my heart command,Can Phaon's eyes forget his Sappho's hand?Must then her name the wretched writer prove,To thy remembrance lost, as to thy love?Ask not the cause that I new numbers choose,The Lute neglected, and the Lyric muse;Love taught my tears in sadder notes to flow,And tun'd my heart to Elegies of woe,I burn, I burn, as when thro' ripen'd cornBy driving winds the spreading flames are borne!Phaon to Aetna's scorching fields retires,While I consume with more than Aetna's fires!No more my soul a charm in music finds,Music has charms alone for peaceful minds.Soft scenes of solitude no more can please,Love enters there, and I'm my own disease.No more the Lesbian dames my passion move,Once the dear objects of my guilty love;All other loves are lost in only thine,

4. Heroides2 Ah youth ungrateful to a flame like mine!Whom would not all those blooming charms surprize,Those heav'nly looks, and dear deluding eyes?The harp and bow would you like Phoebus bear,A brighter Phoebus Phaon might appear;Would you with ivy wreath your flowing hair, Not Bacchus' self with Phaon could compare:Yet Phoebus lov'd, and Bacchus felt the flame,One Daphne warm'd, and one the Cretan dame,Nymphs that in verse no more could rival me,That ev'n those Gods contend in charmswith thee.The Muses teach me all their softest lays,And the wide world resounds with Sappho's praise.Tho' great Alcaeus more sublimely sings,And strikes with bolder rage the sounding strings,No less renown attends the moving lyre,Which Venus tunes, and all her loves inspire;To me what nature has in charms deny'd,Is well by wit's more lasting flames supply'd.Tho' short my stature, yet my name extendsTo heav'n itself, and earth's remotest ends.

5. Heroides 3 (end) A spring there is, whose silver waters show,Clear as a glass, the shining sands below:A flow'ryLotos spreads its arms above,Shades all the banks, and seems itself a grove;Eternal greens the mossy margin grace,Watch'd by the sylvan Genius of the place.Here as I lay, and swell'd with tears the flood,Before my sight a wat'ry Virgin stood:She stood and cry'd, 'O you that love in vain!'Fly hence, and seek the fair Leucadian main;'There stands a rock, from whose impending steep'Apollo's fane surveys the rolling deep;'There injur'd lovers, leaping from above,'Their flames extinguish, and forget to love.'Deucalion once, with hopeless fury burn'd,'In vain he lov'd, relentless Pyrrhascorn'd;'But when from hence he plung'd into the main,'Deucalion scorn'd, and Pyrrhalov'd in vain.Haste, Sappho, haste, from high Leucadia throw'Thy wretched weight, nor dread the deeps below!'She spoke, and vanish'd with the voice - I rise,And silent tears fall trickling from my eyes.I go, ye Nymphs! those rocks and seas to prove;How much I fear, but ah, how much I love!I go, ye Nymphs! where furious love inspires;Let female fears submit to female fires.To rocks and seas I fly from Phaon's hate,And hope from seas and rocks a milder fate.Ye gentle gales, beneath my body blow,And softly lay me on the waves below!

6. Heroides 4 And thou, kind Love, my sinking limbs sustain,Spread thy soft wings, and waft me o'er the main,Nor let a Lover's death the guiltless flood profane!On Phoebus' shrine my harp I'll then bestow,And this Inscription shall be plac'd below.'Here she who sung, to him that did inspire,'Sappho to Phoebus consecrates her Lyre;'What suits with Sappho, Phoebus, suits with thee;The Gift, the giver, and the God agree.'But why, alas, relentless youth, ah whyTo distant seas must tender Sappho fly?Thy charms than those may far more pow'rful be,And Phoebus' self is less a God to me.Ah! canst thou doom me to the rocks and sea,O far more faithless and more hard than they?Ah! canst thou rather see this tender breastDash'd on these rocks than to thy bosom prest?This breast which once, in vain! you lik'd so well;Where Loves play'd, and where the Muses dwell.Alas! the Muses now no more inspire,Untun'd my lute, and silent is my lyre,My languid numbers have forgot to flow,And fancy sinks beneath a weight of woe.

7. Heroides 5 Ye Lesbian virgins, and ye Lesbian dames,Themes of my verse, and objects of my flames,No more your groves with my glad songs shall ring,No more these hands shall touch the trembling string:My Phaon's fled, and I those arts resign(Wretch that I am, to call that Phaon mine!)Return, fair youth, return, and bring alongJoy to my soul, and vigour to my song:Absent from thee, the Poet's flame expires;But ah! how fiercely burn the Lover's fires!Gods! can no pray'rs, no sighs, no numbers moveOne savage heart, or teach it how to love?The winds my pray'rs, my sighs, my numbers bear,The flying winds have lost them all in air!Oh when, alas! shall more auspicious galesTo these fond eyes restore thy welcome sails?If you return - ah why these long delays?Poor Sappho dies while careless Phaon stays.O launch thy bark, secure of prosp'rous gales;Cupid for thee shall spread the swelling gales;If you will fly - (yet ah! what cause can be,Too cruel youth, that you should fly from me?)If not from Phaon I must hope for ease,Ah let me seek it from the raging seas:To raging seas unpity'd I'll remove,And either cease to live or cease to love!

8. Issues • Poetry as expression of emotion v. excessive emotion as destructive of poetry. The poetof love abandons poetry, when actually in love. • The personal (handwriting, body, unrequited love) and the impersonal (genre, mythology, suicide?, poetry?) • ‟guilty love” • control and self-control • fame / having a name • norms, expectations

9. Poetic traditions • Augustan: Latin + British • Renaissance: Petrarchan • Grafting the Ovidian elegy onto the Petrarchan love sonnet • Instead of a sentimental outburst, a very self-conscious and educated experiment.

10. Gendered lyric subjectivities • From Ovid’s imaginative recreation of a woman’s words to Robinson’s heady version of a woman talking from a masculine position. • Strengths and weaknesses, empowering or domesticating the passionate female voice.

11. Embodied, sexual female subjects • The limits of representation in Ovid, in Pope’s translation, in the Petrarchan tradition… • All in a suicidal situation.

12. Aesthetics and Structure • From Edmund Burke’s A philosophical enquiry intotheoriginofour ideas of thesublime and beautiful (1757) • ‟For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation: beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive.”

13. HistoricalChronology 1 (BasedonWu) • 1773 - Boston Tea Party • 1776 - American Declaration of Independence • 1787 - The Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade established in London • 1787 - American Constitution drafted and signed • 1788 - George III suffers mental collapse • 1789 - Storming of the Bastille • 1789 - Price addresses the London Revolution Society • 1790 - The Ogé rebellion in San Domingo • 1791 - Anti-Dissenter riots in Birmingham during which Joseph Priestley’s house is burned down by Church-and-King mobs • 1791 - Slave Riots in San Domingo • 1791 - United Irishmen founded by Wolfe Tone in Belfast to fight for Irish nationalism • 1792 - Paine charged with sedition • 1792 - September Massacres of royalists and other prisoners in Paris • 1792 - Robespierre elected to the National Assembly • 1793 - Louis XVI executed – Britaindeclareswar

14. Historical Chronology 2 • 1793 - Marat murdered in his bath by Charlotte Corday, heralding the Terror • 1793 - Marie Antoinette Executed • 1794 - Robespierre executed; end of the Terror • 1794 - Treason trials begin in London with the trial of Thomas Hardy • 1796 - Napoleon commands Italian campaign, defeating Austrians • 1798 - Uprising of the United Irishmen • 1801 - Toussaint L’Ouverture takes command of Haiti, liberates black slaves • 1805 - Emmet leads an uprising in Ireland which fails due to lack of French support • 1805 - Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson mortally wounded • 1805 - Napoleon defeats Russian and Austrian armies at Austerlitz • 1807 - Abolition Act receives royal assent, abolishing the slave trade

15. HistorialChronology 3 • 1811 - Prince of Wales declared Regent, his father having been recognized as insane • 1811 - First Luddite riots in Nottingham • 1812 - Assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval • 1812 - America declares war on Britain • 1812 - Napoleon enters Moscow • 1814 - Napoleon defeated at Toulouse; exiled to Elba • 1815 - Napoleon escapes from Elba • 1815 - Napoleon defeated at Waterloo; exiled to Saint Helena in August • 1817 - William Hone (radical publisher) tried for publishing ‘blasphemous parodies’ • 1819 - Peterloo Massacre takes place, St Peter’s Fields, Manchester • 1819 - Trial of Richard Carlile, radical publisher • 1828 - Repeal of Test and Corporation Acts that kept non-Anglicans from holding office • 1829 - Catholic Relief Act • 1832 - Reform Bill receives royal assent • 1833 - Emancipation Act receives its final reading, abolishing slavery in British colonies

16. Revolution • After sharing in the benefits of one Revolution [of 1688], I have been spared to be a witness to two other Revolutions, both glorious. And now, methinks, I see the ardor for liberty catching and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs, the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience. Be encouraged all ye friends of freedom and writers in its defence . . . Behold the light you have struck out, after setting America free, reflected to France and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes and warms and illuminates Europe! (Richard Price, Discourse on the Love of our Country,1789) • ‘Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race’ (Robert Southey, Correspondence) • ‘Bliss … in that dawn to be alive’ (Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book X)

17. Pamphlets 1 But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. […] THIS mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. (Edmund Burke, ReflectionsontheRevolutionin France, 1790)

18. Pamphlets 2 • Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights ofMen (1790) and A Vindication of theRights of Woman (1792) • William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) • Catherine Graham’s Observations on theReflections(1790) • James Mackintosh’sVindiciaeGallicae(1791) • Joseph Priestley’sLettersto the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1791) • John Thelwall’sSober Reflections (1796) • Coleridge’s Conciones ad Populum(1795) • Wordsworth’s (unpublished) Letter to theBishop of Llandaff(1793) • Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, published in two parts in 1791 and 1792. [most accessibledefense of Enlightenmentconceptofgeneral human rights]

19. Repression • May 1792, the same month in which the guillotine was used in Paris for thefirst time, George III issued a Proclamation against Seditious Writings (usedthroughout the 1790s,againstbooksellers, writers and other radical activists) • February1793, declaration of war between Britain and France, after which time democratic sympathies of any kind were liable to be interpretedas traitorous as well as seditious. • May 1794, suspension of Habeas Corpus,thenTreason Trials, in which 12 leading London radicalsarrested andcharged with High Treason • Habeas Corpus was again suspended in 1798, and further restrictions on the right ofassembly and the freedom of speech were imposed by the Two Acts of 1795 and the SixActs of 1799 • The radicals became steadily more isolated as governmentrepression continued and the war with Revolutionary France turnedmore andmore people away from politics towards the patriotic defence of the realm.

20. Richard Polwhele, The unsex'dfemales1 A female band despising NATURE's law, As "proud defiance" flashes from their arms, And vengeance smothers all their softer charms. I shudder at the new unpictur'd scene, Where unsex'd woman vaunts the imperious mien; Where girls, affecting to dismiss the heart, Invoke the Proteus of petrific art; With equal ease, in body or in mind, To Gallic freaks or Gallic faith resign'd… Ah! once the female Muse, to NATURE true, The unvalued store from FANCY, FEELING drew; Won, from the grasp of woe, the roseate hours, Cheer'd life's dim vale, and strew'd the grave with flowers. [Page 12]But lo! where, pale amidst the wild, she draws Each precept cold from sceptic Reason's vase; Pours with rash arm the turbid stream along, And in the foaming torrent whelms the throng.

21. Richard Polwhele, The unsex'dfemales2 See Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks, Arise, the intrepid champion of her sex; O'er humbled man assert the sovereign claim, And slight the timid blush of virgin fame. "Go, go (she cries) ye tribes of melting maids, "Go, screen your softness in sequester'd shades; "With plaintive whispers woo the unconscious grove, "And feebly perish, as depis'd ye love. "What tho' the fine Romances of Rousseau "Bid the flame flutter, and the bosom glow;[…] "No more by weakness winning fond regard; "Nor eyes, that sparkle from their blushes, roll, "Nor catch the languors of the sick'ning soul, "Nor the quick flutter, nor the coy reserve, […] "Blend mental energy with Passion's fire, "Surpass their rivals in the powers of mind "And vindicate the Rights of Womankind."

22. Richard Polwhele, The unsex'dfemales3 • Fn. "Nature is the grand basis of all laws human and divine: and the woman, who has no regard to nature, either in the decoration of her person, or the culture of her mind, will soon 'walk after the flesh, in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government"‚ • Lady Macbeth: …Come, you spiritsThat tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,And fill me from the crown to the toe top-fullOf direst cruelty! make thick my blood;Stop up the access and passage to remorse,That no compunctious visitings of natureShake my fell purpose, nor keep peace betweenThe effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,Wherever in your sightless substancesYou wait on nature's mischief! (V.1 [regicide])

23. MaryWollstonecraft, AVindicationofthe Rights of Woman (1792) • Inspiredbyherindignationat the fact that women were explicitly beingexcluded from the compulsory schoolingofferedtomeninFrance. - ‘Who made man the exclusive judge,’ she asked, ‘if woman partakewith him the gift of reason?’ • Firstprinciple that there was only onestandard of human virtue which must be the same for men and women. • Arguedfortheinstitutionaland legal changes which would follow from the recognition of women’s rationality andmoral autonomy: • educationwhich combined intellectual training with useful skills; • the need for an end to the sexualdouble standard; • reform of marriage; • admission of women to fields of study and of paid employment, which would allow them; • economic independence (medicine and business as possibleprofessional pursuits, politicsand history for intellectual and moral improvement). • their duties as mothers provided the basis of their claimstobe independentcitizens

24. MaryWollstonecraft, AVindicationofthe Rights of Woman (1792) • A philosophical essay against the social, political, and economic marginalization of women. • At a time when the question of the “rights of man” was being debated in France and the US. • The difference between men and women is not natural (ideology) but learned. • Education should be changed, so that instead of making women sentimental and childlike (often domestic slaves), they become fully rational agents. • Criticism: universal Enlightenment ideal of Reason.

25. Education • THE Enlightenment project: ‘We have reason to conclude, that great Care is to be had of the forming Children’s Minds, and giving them that seasoning early, which shall influence their Lives always after.’ (Locke) + debate about perfectibility, natural goodness • BUT: Rousseau’s Emile(1762) • Hannah More: ‘Is it not a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may perhaps want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify.’ • Hannah More: ‘the man whose happiness she is one day to make, whose family she is to govern, and whose children she is to educate . . . he will seek for her in the bosom of retirement, in the practice of every domestic virtue . . . to embellish the narrow but charming circle of family delights…’ • Catherine Cappe: ‘cultivation of social and pious affections, gentleness of temper and resignation to the will of God [were] as important to the female character in the lowest as well as the highest forms of life’ • Education: limiting spheres of action + beginning to provide the schooling to expand those limits; both with regard to gender and class

26. Education 2 • TheBrougham Report in 1819 estimated that about 30 per cent of children hada little schooling. The Children’s Employment Commission of 1833concluded that only 10 per cent of children had satisfactory schooling,whereas 40 per cent had none at all. • Élite and middling women’s life stories confirm a high incidence of homeeducation, showing that it was often preferred even when schools wereavailable. With time, competence, and interest, mothers taught daughtersthemselves, but the period also saw the rise of the governess as animportant part of the educational structure. One study of English womenshowed that 60 per cent of middle-class girls were educated at home, andthe trend is similarly pronounced among girls of the élite

27. Educational Reform • embedded in a widerEuropean debate about women’s rights; not all critics were liberals, and the strong evangelicalbelief in virtue played an important role. • Scots educationalist, Elizabeth Hamilton: ‘to be virtuous, women needed to be educated in morals ratherthan manners’, • Maria Edgeworth defended the rightof women to useful knowledge, including the sciences, rather than be keptin ‘Turkish Ignorance’, • Hannah More and the radical Mary Wollstonecraft condemnedwhat More termed, ‘this phrenzy of accomplishments’. • More: to makegirls into ‘good daughters, good wives, good mistresses, good members ofsociety, good Christians’.

28. Further Education • Within women’s educational history, the foundation of Queen’s College, London, in 1848, is seen as a landmark. It provided a foundation to givegovernesses and teachers a better educational grounding, thus marking the • Historianshave looked for institutions that gave qualifications and access toprofessional standing. • In fact, a range of training and educational genres existed, includingmidwifery training, ‘teacher training’, and liberal arts or scientific studies,to which numerous women turned in their efforts at ‘improvement’. Suchopportunities could be structurally very casual, relying upon improving‘leisure’ activities. • Lecture series were also offered in many British towns. Most were open to women; some even offered womenconcessions. • In 1803, it was noted: ‘Even some ladies talk withfacility about oxygen . . . hydrogen and the carbonic acid.’Some of these serieswere clearly associated with the universities. Lectures on ExperimentalPhilosophy at Oxford included women from 1710. Lectures at UniversityCollege, London, were open to women from its foundation in 1825. The Royal Institution inLondon admitted women from its inception (1799).

29. Marriageand Family • Our knowledge of women in the past has long been focused on theirfamilial roles and relationships. • Women’s familial and marital identity was framed by a combination oflegal, religious, medical, and popular ideas • patriarchal, but companionate • Men’s legal, social,and political power over women was located, as well as learned, it wasargued, within the home.Prescriptive literature expounded a husband’sauthority over his wife and delineated the strict hierarchies to be maintainedwithin households between husbands and wives, parents andchildren, and masters and their servants. • At their wedding ceremonies,women in England and Wales effectively kissed goodbye to their status asindividuals, as husbands subsumed their legal rights according to the lawof coverture. Theoretically, women and everything they owned, becamethe property of their husbands. • In his 1765 Commentaries on the Laws ofEngland, Sir William Blackstone declared: ’By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, thevery being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended duringthe marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into thatof the husband . . . [her property] becomes absolutely her husband’swhich at his death he may leave entirely from her’ • BUT Recourse to equity and ecclesiastical law, and the useof marriage settlements, allowed women of all social classes to retainsomecontrol over their property.

30. Marriage and Family 2 • During the eighteenth century, people were marrying earlier. • They werealso having more children than at any time before, both inside and outsideof marriage. • In the first half of the century, the mean age at first marriagewas 27.5 years for men and 26.2 years for women; by mid-century, it haddropped to 26.4 for men and 23.4 for women • The significant rise inpopulation during the eighteenth century was due to an increase in fertilityprecipitated by this decline in the age of marriage • Until the twentiethcenturythere was no consensus between the state, church, andpopular opinion as to how marriage should be defined • Before the Marriage Act of 1753 there was little consensus as to whatconstituted a legal marriage. • For centuries a gulf had existed between theways in which the élite and poor had married. The wealthywould celebrate their unions in public, often in church, after declaring thebanns and buying a license. The poor would marry in much more informalcircumstances, often using verbal contracts and folklore customs familiarto the local community • ‘co-dependency’ best describes most marriages.

31. Marriage and Family • By the early nineteenth century, as more women resisted the power oftheir spouses, public opinion and the law increasingly demanded thathusbands treat their wives with humanity. Men’s violence towards womencame to be interpreted as the neglect of male duties. Nineteenth-centurynotions of respectability defined such behaviour as unmanly. • The struggle for a mother’s rights over her childrenwas partly resolved in the passage of the Infant Custody Act of 1839, whichstipulated that a mother of legitimate children had legal rights over heroffspring until they reached seven years of age • feminist demands for a wife’s control over her own property were notmet until the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts in 1870and 1886

32. Parents and Children • The duties of mothers and fathers were fundamentally gendered anddiffered ideologically as well as in practice. Theological, medical, social,and legal understandings of women were intimately bound up with theircapacity to bear children. • A woman’s reproductive status defined her andmotherhood was deemed her natural role. • The physical relationshipbetween women and their children explained why maternal affection wasdeemed to be stronger than the love of fathers for their offspring • The emergence of modernity produced a transformationnot only in affective relations between lovers and marriagepartners, but also between parents and their children. • Motherhood as an invention of capitalism,suggested that the élite’s practice of wet-nursing children and the poor’spropensity to abandon theirs, proved that early modern mothers andfathers felt little love for their offspring • Only in the eighteenth centurydid childhood come to be acknowledged as a separate stage in the lifecycleand children valued.

33. Parents and Children • The staggeringly high rate of infant mortality upuntil the mid-1700s had supposedly encouraged parents to make lessinvestment in the lives of their newborns and even until the nineteenthcentury, it has been argued, indifference towards infant life and death was common • The decline in infant mortality, deemed to be a direct result ofthe increase in breastfeeding among the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, aswell as a philosophical reassessment of the role of mothers within thefamily • Rousseau, in particular, has been credited with therevaluation of maternity. Many became convinced that women had a vital • role to play in the education of their children and the future citizens. Good mothering and responsible childrearing becamewomen’s social duty • Most wives spent almost their entire married livespregnant or caring for children. • Women on average bore 6–7 live children

34. Thomas Laqueur,Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud(1992) Not only did the idea of ‘sex’ not always exist, butbeforeabout 1800 in Europe bodies were seen in radically different ways. Far from our ancestors living in a world in whichsex was a fundamental reality given by biology, the primary reality for themwas a divine order,an order in which bodies were oddly insubstantial things. Bodiesin pre-Enlightenment accounts aremutableindices ofa metaphysical reality.

35. Laqueur 2 • Rather thanbodily morphology providing evidence of an underlying biological reality,it merely “makes vivid and more palpable a hierarchy of heat andperfection that is in itself not available to the senses”. • The ‘one-sex model’describedwoman as a lesser version of man. Men would, in Christian theology, havebeen placed below the diverse orders of the angels, but above the whole of theanimal kingdom. • Fundamentalpolarity between the sexes basedupon discoverable biological differences: substantialhorizontaldifference, instead of a verticalone of degree

36. Laqueur 3 • What is also marked after 1800is that bodies are being thought of in a different way, as the foundation andguarantor of particular sorts of social arrangements. “no one was much interested in looking for evidence of two distinctsexes until such differences became politically important”. • Sexis a motivated inventionbornof gender:inextricable link between the ways in whichbodies are imagined and the political andcultural imperatives of gender. • The body does not automatically give itself to be interpreted in this or thatparticular way:“Two sexes are not the necessary, natural consequence of corporealdifference.Nor,for that matter,is one sex”.

37. The sexual body • Aristotle, Hippocrates, andGalen Asaw the body consisting offour humours or fluids: blood, choler, black bile, and phlegm. And eachhumour was related to two qualities – hot or cold and moist or dry – ofwhich the most perfect was hot and dry [men]. • Allowed for great variety and mutability within and betweenbodies, rather than simply absolutes. • Male and female bodies were based on the samemodel of physiology. For example, in trying to maintain a balance of thehumours, they purged excess fluids in very similar ways. • According to theHippocratic and Galenic two-seed theories, both women and men werebelieved to emit seed and excess fluid at the point of orgasm. This is notto say that women and men were the same. Differences did exist, but theseoriginated from the different balance of the humours in male and femalebodies. This essentially physiological model determined how bodies were built. • Men’s and women’s genitals were structurally and functionally the same,and the same vocabulary was used for many body parts. For example, theword ‘testicle’ was used for the organs which contained the seed in bothwomen and men: ‘Women have testicles or stones, as have the men’, wroteJohn Marten in 1708. • Illustrations of women’sreproductive organs presented the uterus and vagina as one long andenclosed sheath, which looked remarkably similar to depictions of thepenis.

38. Femalegenitalia • Galen, (200 A.D.)"All the parts, then, that men have, women have too, the difference between them lying in only one thing, […] namely, that in women the parts are within [the body], whereas in men they are outside, in the region called the perineum.” • Illustrations of women’sreproductive organs presented the uterus and vagina as one long andenclosed sheath, which looked remarkably similar to depictions of thepenis. • Illustrationby Andreas Vesalius (1514-1664)

39. Implications of thetwo-sexsystem • In theEnlightenment,the body wasincreasinglyused as evidence that difference wasimmutable and permanent: The humoralsystem declined in popularity and anatomical sexual differences werestressed. • From 1700, the term ‘vagina’ was used invernacular medical texts to describe the cavity that had previously not hadits own name; later in the eighteenth century, the term ‘ovary’ appeared • When depicted visually, the uterusand vagina were often splayed open, lessening the parallel with the penis. • All images of skeletons had once been based on male corpses, but imagesof female skeletons with anarrower ribcage, wider pelvis, and smaller skullreflected the assumptions these men • Muscles were shownusing male models, nerves using female models • femaleskeletonsoften displayed flowing hairand pearl necklaces, and reclined in passive poses • the sperm wasa hungry, active cell, which dispelled energy; the ovum a quiescent cell,whichstoredenergy • the female orgasm wasrelegated ‘to the periphery of human physiology’: women were reimaginedas sexually passive

40. Religion • There were two established and legally co-equal churches inBritain: the Church of England (Anglican), established in Wales and Ireland, as well as in England, and the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) inScotland. Neither church allowed women to be ordained, to preach, or, inthe case of the Church of Scotland, to be elders. In England, Wales, andIreland holders of civic offices had to take communion in the Church ofEngland at least once a year, and students at Oxford, Cambridge, and TrinityCollege Dublin had to assent to the Thirty-Nine Articles before they matriculated. • However, the Toleration Act of 1689 gave freedom of worship to themain Dissenting denominations (Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists,and Quakers), though the non-Trinitarian Unitarians had to wait until 1813for legal recognition of their right to worship. Roman Catholics wereexpressly excluded from the Act. • The major eighteenth-century religious development was the Evangelicalrevival, which began in the 1730s. A second wave at the end of the centurysaw Methodism become a separate denomination and the EvangelicalAnglican Clapham sect become prominent in the movement for theabolition of the slave trade. • Christian missionariesall over theEmpire

41. Women and Religion • TheGenesis account of creation which proclaimed woman’s responsibilityfor the fall of man, and the New Testament prohibitions of women’spreaching (I Corinthians 14:34 and I Timothy 2:9–15) were generally takenat face value, by women as well as men • 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 King James Version (KJV): 34Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church. • I Timothy 2:11–15 : Let the woman learn in silence with all subjectionBut I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.For Adam was first formed, then Eve.And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety. • BUT Galatians 3:28 King James Version (KJV)There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. • The Bible also gave women a language to validate their callings. The title‘mother in Israel’ was given to the Old Testament prophetess, Deborah(Judges 5:7), and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries –the title provided a vindication for those women whosought a public role or assumed positions of leadership • Religion provided women with opportunities deniedthem in secular society.

42. Women and Religion 2 • Some historians have claimed that Christianity become increasinglyfeminized in this period – and not only because women outnumbered menin many denominations. • The eighteenth-century fusion of Methodistenthusiasm with the secular cult of sensibility privileged deeply feltpersonal experience above academic rationality. The new religion of theheart was exemplified in the vivid language of the Methodist servant, MaryBarnard: ‘I think the Lord has washed my soul as clean as the stones in thebrook. • William Wilberforce (Evangelical) believed that ‘the female sex’ possessed a‘more favourable disposition to religion’, which made women ‘the mediumof our intercourse with the heavenly world, the faithful repositories of thereligious principle, for the benefit both of the present and of the risinggeneration’ • Many men were prepared to concede women’s spiritualsuperiority at the same time as they denied them political or intellectualequality [~domesticity]. • Onthe other hand, many devout, energetic, and competent women – mainlymiddle classengaged in a variety of good works, whichcould be justified as extensions of their caring roles as wives and mothers. • philanthropic women crossed the boundaries between the ‘masculine’ public and the ‘feminine’ privatespheres, and, in doing so, they set up what might be described as a ‘thirdsphere’ of creative and flexible interaction between the domestic hearthand the world of business and politics

43. Women and Religion 3 • Mary Astell (1661–1731), nowrecognized as the first English feminist, derived her inspiration from afusion of the philosophy of Descartes, the spirituality of high Anglicanism,and Christian Platonism. In her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694–7),she argued that women should be taken seriously as rational beings, and,envisaged a ‘Protestant nunnery’– an independent space where they could cultivate their intellects as wellas their souls. • Susanna Wesley (1670–1742), motherof John and Charles [methodism], began holdingmeetings in her house for prayer and sermon-reading, which wereattended by several hundred local townspeople. Recognizing her success,her husband over-rode the objections of his curate and allowed her tocontinuewithhermeetings. • Of all the dissenting sects, the Society of Friends gave the greatest scopefor female participation, and the high literacy rate among Quaker womenis a tribute to their status in the movement, Its founder, George Fox (1624-91), hadallowed women to preach, but for the majority of Quaker women it wasthe Women’s Yearly Meeting, set up as a properly constituted Meeting in1784, which gave them their most important role in the Society • The Rational Dissenters and their successors, the Unitarians, werecommitted to liberalizing society, expanding education, and freeing themind from the shackles of religious doctrine. The writer and educator, Anna Barbauld(1743–1825), represented the conservative strand of Rational Dissent,Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), the more radical. Wollstonecraft learned her politics from Richard Price; her works were published by Joseph Johnson, theofficial publisher of the Rational Dissenters.

44. Women and work • the idea that theperiod 1700–1850 witnessed both a significant narrowing in opportunitiesfor women’s work and a lowering in its status is still widely held, explainedtypicallybythe decline of the family economy in theeighteenth century and argued that women were both economically and • socially marginalized by industrial development • It has been claimed that the industrialrevolution helped to promote separate spheres ideology, and with it suchdevelopments as restrictive labour practices and campaigns for the familywage, which served to redefine and revitalize patriarchal forces. • Farm labour in Britain has traditionally been divided into men’s andwomen’s work, with women who laboured for pay typically receiving onethirdto one-half of a male wage: suggesting a long-standing presumptionthat female work was less valuable than men’s. • Like female agricultural workers, women miners appear to have offendedmiddle-class sensibilities by virtue of their physical appearance and dress • Evenso, women commonly worked underground inmining, in coalmines,most women were employed as bearers, carrying coal from the face to thesurface. • Womenand children were employed in manufacturing in disproportionatenumbers. It frequently centred around textiles and involvedwomen working as spinners, silk throwers, lace-makers, and frameworkknitters

45. Women and Work 2 • ‘When we talk of industry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’,claims Berg, ‘we are talking of a largely female workforce.’Much of thisworkforce was poorly paid and doing work deemed less skilled thanmen’s. • Organized action against women workers could involve violence. In 1819, several unemployed malespinners attacked a group of women spinners newly employed at theBroomward cotton mills near Glasgow. • Service occupations, and domestic service in particular, were dominated bywomen workers and were by far the greatest employers of women duringour period. • Prostitution was generally entered into by young, poor women, women who worked as servants, needlewomen, and engagedin other casual work, often supplemented their income in this way.the fact that many contemporary estimates areextremely high had more to do with middle-class moral panic thanaccurate social measurements. • Middle-class women engagedin trade. Middlingwomen wereexpected to withdraw from the world of work as the eighteenth century progressed BUT perhaps one-third ofwomen of property ran a business in the early eighteenth century, whichconstituted some 5–10 per cent of all businesses in the capital at thattime. • Thissuggests, rather than a decline, some consistency in terms of middlingwomen’s involvement in the world of work.

46. Women and Work 3 • The professions were male-dominated during our period, but womenwere not totally excluded from the professional ranks during the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries: women also earned money as authors and paintersWomen did perform medical care for money, but this was often as midwives, nurses, wet nurses, anddruggists, dentists, surgeons, and occulists in England until the late eighteenth century • Teaching was one of the few professions open to women that expandedbetween 1700 and 1850, because it was not regarded as a profession and assuch was largely unregulated • There is no doubt that ideas about gender and about what constituted‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’ had a great impact on the female labourforce during our period. Increasingly, male identity was shaped by work,while the feminine was associated with domesticity. …Yet it was not the case than men and women always performedseparate jobs. Men’s and women’s work evidently overlapped in areas suchas shopkeeping, weaving, and innkeeping, in towns with one dominantindustry – such as the mill towns of Oldham and Bury – and at certaintimes, such as when labour was in short supply or during harvest in ruralareas. Although women were increasingly associated with the domesticand the maternal in literary sources, the evidence that this constrainedtheir working patterns is not conclusive.

47. Recommended general works on women, poetry and romanticism Barker, Hannah and Elaine Chalus. Eds. Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Gerrard, Christine. Ed. A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Labbe, Jacqueline M. Ed. The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750–1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Mahoney, Charles. Ed. A Companion to Romantic Poetry. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. McCalman, Iain. Ed. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. British Culture 1776-1832. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Shattock, Joanne. Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Wu, Duncan. Ed. A Companion to Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Wu, Duncan. Ed. Romanticism: An Anthology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Wu, Duncan. Ed. Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.