0521816688 cambridge university press fatal women of romanticism jan 2003

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FATAL WOMEN OF ROMANTICISM

Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the
works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun
demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales played an important
role in the development of Romantic women’s poetic identities and
informed their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality,
and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from
the s through the s. She discusses the work of well-known
figures including Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers such as Anne Bannerman. By examining women writers’ fatal
women in historical, political, and medical contexts, Craciun uncovers a far-ranging debate on sexual difference. She also engages with
current research on the history of the body and sexuality, providing an important historical precedent for modern feminist theory’s
ongoing dilemma regarding the status of “woman” as a sex.
       is lecturer in English and Director of the
Centre for Byron Studies at the University of Nottingham. She
is the editor of Zofloya, or the Moor () and A Routledge Literary
Sourcebook on Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(), and co-editor of Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the
French Revolution ().



   
General editors
Professor Marilyn Butler
Professor James Chandler
University of Oxford

University of Chicago
Editorial board
John Barrell, University of York
Paul Hamilton, University of London
Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge
Kenneth Johnston, Indiana University
Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
David Simpson, University of California, Davis
This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging
fields within English literary studies. From the early s to the early s
a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition,
not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many
modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for
writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what
Wordsworth called those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking
place’: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanisation, industrialisation, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the
reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it
pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and
literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by
Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the
Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has
produced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses of
modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those
notions of ‘literature’ and of literary history, especially national literary history,
on which modern scholarship in English has been founded.
The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent
historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging
corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have
helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one

will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either
side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.
For a complete list of titles published see end of book.



FATA L WO M E N O F
RO M A N T I C I S M
ADRIANA CRACIUN


  
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , United Kingdom
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521816687
© Adriana Craciun 2003
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of
relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2002
-
isbn-13 978-0-511-07395-3 eBook (NetLibrary)
-
 eBook (NetLibrary)
isbn-10 0-511-07395-X
-
isbn-13 978-0-521-81668-7 hardback

-
isbn-10 0-521-81668-8 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.


for Kari E. Lokke and Jerome J. McGann



There is no knowledge but I know it.
Nick Cave, “Far from Me”



Contents

List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations

page xii
xiii
xvi


Introduction
 The subject of violence: Mary Lamb, femme fatale



 Violence against difference: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary
Robinson and women’s strength



 “The aristocracy of genius”: Mary Robinson and Marie
Antoinette



 Unnatural, unsexed, undead: Charlotte Dacre’s Gothic
bodies



 “In seraph strains, unpitying, to destroy”: Anne
Bannerman’s femmes fatales



 “Life has one vast stern likeness in its gloom”: Letitia
Landon’s philosophy of decomposition



Notes
Bibliography

Index





xi


List of illustrations

Figure  Frontispiece to Mary and Charles Lamb’s
Mrs. Leicester’s School ()
page 
Figure  Henry Fuseli, “Woman with a Stiletto, Man’s Head
with a Startled Expression” (–)

Figure  MacKenzie after E. W. Thomson,“The Dark Ladie,”
from Anne Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry
()

Figure  MacKenzie after E. W. Thompson [sic], “The
Prophecy of Merlin,” from Anne Bannerman’s Tales
of Superstition and Chivalry ()


xii


Acknowledgments

While working on this book, I have benefited much from the assistance
and feedback of many colleagues and friends. Without the support of
Marilyn Butler, Linda Bree, and especially James Chandler at Cambridge
University Press this book would not have materialized, and so to them
I am particularly grateful. Marilyn Butler and my anonymous readers
at Cambridge also provided in-depth responses to the manuscript – my
thanks to them for their generous and challenging readings.
While working on this book, I received grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Nottingham. I
would also like to thank the following libraries for permission to publish materials: Ashmolean Library, Oxford; UCLA Library Department of Special Collections; UC Davis Library Department of Special
Collections; National Library of Scotland; British Library; The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Hertfordshire Archives and
Local Studies; Edinburgh University Library. Parts of three chapters appeared elsewhere, and I am grateful to those publishers for permission
to reprint material here in revised form: “ ‘I hasten to be disembodied’:
Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover, and Representations of the Body”
(European Romantic Review  []); “Introduction: Charlotte Dacre and
the Vivisection of Virtue,” Zofloya; or, The Moor, by Charlotte Dacre,
ed. Adriana Craciun (Broadview, ); “Violence Against Difference:
Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Robinson,” in Making History: Textuality
and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Greg Clingham (Bucknell
University Press/Associated University Presses, ); “The Subject of
Violence: Mary Lamb, Femme Fatale,” in Romanticism and Women Poets:
Opening the Doors of Reception, ed. Stephen Behrendt and Harriet Kramer
Linkin (University Press of Kentucky, ).
Fatal Women of Romanticism took shape while I worked in several universities, and I want to thank my colleagues for their patience and input as I
xiii


xiv

Acknowledgments

completed this project. At the University of California, Davis, I benefited
from working with Peter Dale, David Van Leer, Marc Blanchard, and
Seth Schein; without Rebecca Sammel’s support and friendship, graduate school would have been a far less enjoyable enterprise; and without
Jane King’s pioneering exploration of the women poets found in the
UC Davis Kohler Collection, I may never have embarked on this particular project. At Loyola University Chicago, I had the great pleasure
of working with Steve Jones, who is everything a Romanticist colleague
and friend should be, while, at Nottingham, M´aire n´ı Fhlath´uin, Janette
Dillon, and Tracy Hargreaves have contributed much, intellectually and
materially, to my well-being. Joanna Dodd provided research assistance
at critical moments that eased the process of revision. To the exemplary
intellectual energy of Frank Cousens at the University of Puget Sound I
owe the impetus for joining this profession in the first place.
A number of colleagues and friends provided insights and encouragement while I worked on Fatal Women of Romanticism: Andrew Ashfield,
C. M. Baumer, Stephen Behrendt, Kevin Binfield, Anne Close, Markman Ellis, Dana Frank, Michael Gamer, Jen Harvie, Ian Haywood,
Glenn Himes, Mark Kozelek, Nancy Kushigian, Donna Landry, Cindy
Lawford, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Louise Millar, Judith Pascoe, Mary
Peace, Orianne Smith, Nan Sweet, Barbara Taylor, Barry Wallis, Susan
Wolfson, Duncan Wu. The scholarship of Anne Mellor, Stuart Curran,
and Nancy Armstrong in particular provided powerful precedents, and
I benefited much from their landmark work on women writers and gender, even where I seem most to disagree. I would also like to thank Anne
Janowitz for her generous support and advice, and, equally important,
for her help in revising my book’s title, much improved from my original.
To my family, who seemed never to give up hope in Fatal Women of
Romanticism or its author, I owe more than I can say: Magdalena and
George Craciun, Rodica and Aurel Dragut, Nan and Bruce Parker. Undoubtedly the longest-suffering of them all is John Logan, whose affection
remains my greatest source of happiness. Without John’s unwavering support behind the scenes, Fatal Women of Romanticism would not have seen
the light of day.
My two greatest intellectual and personal debts are to Kari Lokke

and Jerome McGann. My conversations with them about Romanticism
continually inspire me with new ideas, and their support of my efforts
has made all the difference. In gratitude for their generous friendship
and imagination, I dedicate this book to them.


Acknowledgments

xv

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for
external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the
time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for
the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or
that the content is or will remain appropriate.


Abbreviations

AB
Ainsi
Ashfield
Blanchard
Bodies
EC
Hours
IR
LCML
Letter

Bannerman, Anne, Poems. A New Edition, Edinburgh:
Mundell, Doig and Stevenson, 
Robinson, Mary, Ainsi va le Monde, Inscribed to Robert
Merry, nd edn, London, 
Ashfield, Andrew, ed., Women Romantic Poets
–: An Anthology, Manchester University Press,

Blanchard, Laman, Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L.,
 vols., London, 
Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of “Sex”, London: Routledge, 
Landon, Letitia, Ethel Churchill: or, the Two Brides, 
vols. in  (), ed. F. J. Sypher, Delmar, NY:
Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 
Dacre, Charlotte (King), Hours of Solitude. A Collection of
original Poems, now first published,  vols. (), New
York: Garland, 
Robinson, Mary, Impartial Reflections on the Present
Situation of the Queen of France, by a Friend to Humanity,
London: John Bell, 
Lamb, Charles and Mary, The Letters of Charles and
Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, –
Robinson, Mary, A Letter to the Women of England, on the
Injustice of Mental Subordination. A Hypertext Edition,
published by Romantic Circles [signed “Anne Frances
Randall,” ] ed. Adriana Craciun, Anne Irmen,
Megan Musgrove, and Orianne Smith
(www.otal.umd.edu/rc/eleced/robinson/cover.htm,
)

xvi


List of abbreviations
LF

LPW
Memoirs
Monody
ND
NLS
Nymphomania

Passions
PL
Reflections
RG
RPW
RR
STC
Tales

xvii

Williams, Helen Maria, Letters from France,  vols. in ,
Fascimile reprints with an Introduction by Janet
Todd, Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and
Reprints, 
Landon, Letitia, Poetical Works of L. E. Landon, Boston:
Phillips, Sampson and Co., 

Robinson, Mary, Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson,
ed. M. J. Levy, London: Peter Owen, 
Robinson, Mary, Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen
of France, London: T. Spilsbury and Son, 
Robinson, Mary, The Natural Daughter, with Portraits of
the Leadenhead Family. A Novel,  vols., Dublin: printed
by Brett Smith, 
National Library of Scotland
Bienville, M. D. T., Nymphomania, or, A Dissertation
Concerning the Furor Uterinus, trans. Edward Sloane
Wilmot (London, ); reprinted with Tissot’s
Onanism as Onanism/Nymphomania, New York:
Garland, .
Dacre, Charlotte, The Passions,  vols., London:
Cadell and Davies, ; New York: Arno Press, 
Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge, New
York: Norton, 
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France
(), ed. Thomas Mahoney, New York: Liberal Arts
Press, 
Mellor, Anne, Romanticism and Gender, London:
Routledge, 
Robinson, Mary, Poetical Works  vols. ();
reprinted, introduction by Caroline Franklin,
London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 
Landon, Letitia, Romance and Reality,  vols. ();
reprinted, ed. F. J. Sypher, Delmar, NY: Scholars’
Facsimiles & Reprints, 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Complete Poetical Works
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 
Bannerman, Anne, Tales of Superstition and Chivalry,
London: Vernor and Hood, 


xviii
VRW
Walsingham

WCML
WL
WMW
Wu
WW
Zofloya

List of abbreviations
Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, nd edn (); ed. Carol H. Poston, New
York: Norton, 
Robinson, Mary, Walsingham; or, the Pupil of Nature. A
Domestic Story,  vols., ; Introduction by Peter
Garside,  vols., London: Routledge/Thoemmes,

Lamb, Charles and Mary, Works of Charles and Mary
Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons; London: Methuen, 
Landon, Letitia, Works of Letitia E. Landon,  vols.,
Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co., 
Wollstonecraft, Mary, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft,

 vols., ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, London:
William Pickering, 
Wu, Duncan (ed.), Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology,
Oxford: Blackwell, 
William Wordsworth, Poetical Works of William
Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen
Darbishire, Oxford: Clarendon, 
Dacre, Charlotte, Zofloya; or, the Moor: A Romance of the
Fifteenth Century (), ed. Adriana Craciun,
Peterborough: Broadview, 


Introduction

I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both
in mind and in body.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ()

Women are what they were meant to be; and we wish for no alteration in their bodies or their minds.
William Hazlitt, “The Education of Women” ()

Incarnations of fatal women – the seductress, the mermaid, the queen,
the muse – recur throughout the works of women writers, demonstrating that fatal women played an important role in the development of
women’s poetic identities in the Romantic period. Femmes fatales can
be understood as misogynist projections of the “woman within” by male
writers, as some scholars have argued; yet such accounts leave little
room for women’s surprising uses of these figures, other than as reactive critiques. To ask why they used such figments of male fantasy is to
ask the wrong question, for it assumes that these figures originate in the
imaginations of men. Indeed, part of our problem in mapping the new
terrain of women’s writing in the Romantic period is of our own making,

when we rely on the circular argument that figures such as the femme
fatale and the violent woman originate in and appeal to solely the male
imagination, something that Romantic-period women writers did not
believe.
This book does not trace a continuous tradition of women writers of the Romantic period, nor does it argue that women writers in
this era experienced and articulated a distinct, gender-complementary
Romanticism in reaction to the canonical Romanticisms of male writers.
Feminist literary histories and the anthologies they have produced often
attempt to trace such a continuity in women’s literature, one that answers
Virginia Woolf’s need for literary foremothers, and do so by privileging
nineteenth-century concepts of literary practice and publication, as well





Fatal Women of Romanticism

as feminist perspectives that are not particularly useful when applied,
for example, to women writing before . According to such feminist
literary histories, “anger is an identifying characteristic of the ‘female’
(biological) reacting to the ‘feminine’ (socio-cultural),” writes Margaret
Ezell (Writing Women’s Literary History, ). Ezell’s critique is timely and
illuminating for those who work on women’s writing of the Romantic
period, even though her own focus is on pre- women writers. Unlike their later nineteenth-century counterparts, women writers of the
Romantic period are just now beginning to be reanthologized and recanonized by feminist scholars, and therefore present us with an unique
opportunity to reevaluate not only Romanticism and gender, but also the
meaning and usefulness of a distinct female literary tradition and even
of a distinct femaleness.
While the socio-cultural realm of gender has been the traditional focus

of feminist literary criticism and literary history in the nineteenth century,
this study focuses significant attention on the virtually unexamined realm
of “natural” sex, and argues that sex (that is, the sexed body, male and
female) is central to the study of Romantic-period women. While not
a traditional literary history, Fatal Women of Romanticism does contribute
to the study of women’s literature, but does so while simultaneously
interrogating (not dismissing) the usefulness and historicity of such a
concept as “women’s literature.” The category of biological “women”
(in addition to that of Woman, which has been closely scrutinized by
feminists for centuries) must also be examined, and Denise Riley reminds
us “that such a scrutiny is a thoroughly feminist undertaking”:
the apparent continuity of the subject of “women” isn’t to be relied on; “women”
is both synchronically and diachronically erratic as a collectivity, while for the
individual, “being a woman” is also inconstant, and can’t provide an ontological
foundation. (Am I That Name?, )

To engage these writers and these inconstant categories from our present
vantage point is not to project onto the past postmodern fantasies of
performative sex and gender, but, rather, to attend to the historically
specific and politically interested origins of prevailing modern models of
sexual difference.
Feminist literary histories are not properly historical if they fail to examine the history of sex as well as that of gender. Given the wealth of
new work on the history of the body and of sexuality, we cannot afford to
omit this corporeal history from our reevaluations of these long-neglected


Introduction



writers. Central to my study is an examination of women writers’ diverse
critiques and interrogations of sexual difference (the “natural” realm of
biological sex) as a historically stable and stabilizing reality. I argue that
Romantic-period writers not only have questioned the nature of femininity and culturally constructed gender, but that they also questioned the
stability and naturalness of sex itself. Modern criticism that focuses on
the former instances and ignores the latter does so because the system of
natural sexual difference, which was in fact fiercely contested at the turn
of the nineteenth century, seems intractable and self-evidently universal
two centuries later. What appears self-evident is, of course, ideological
and historical: it is recent histories of the body and of sexual difference
that have helped restore these women’s subtle critiques and questions,
and have made them partially visible to our distant eyes. Once we more
fully appreciate the diversity of opinion (and the urgency of the debates)
regarding “natural” sexual difference among Romantic-period political,
philosophical, and scientific thinkers, we should not be surprised that
women writers also questioned such purportedly natural categories for
their own diverse interests.
Over the last decade, postmodern histories of the body and of sexuality have contested the stability of the sex/gender distinction, and have
instead demonstrated that current models of two distinct sexes are culturally and historically specific. This two-sex system of complementary
difference gained greater credibility throughout the eighteenth century,
supplanting an older one-sex model, in which women’s bodies were seen
essentially as inferior versions of male bodies. This newer two-sex system established a “powerful alternative” according to Thomas Laqueur,
which allowed for “a wide variety of contradictory claims about sexual
difference.” The two-sex model attempted to ground the ideology of
women’s passionlessness and domesticity in empirical science, though, as
Laqueur shows in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, the scientific community was divided over which model to uphold: “It may well
be the case that almost as many people believed that women by nature
were equal in passion to men as believed the opposite” (). Despite the
growing emphasis on a “biology of incommensurability” and women’s
passionlessness (which would support current gender-complementary

models of Romanticism), the one-sex model’s insistence on female sexual desire and on the necessity for female orgasm in conception was not
overturned, but, rather, was conveniently downplayed by advocates of
sexual difference.




Fatal Women of Romanticism

The scientific community’s ambivalence regarding which model of
sexual difference to uphold, amounting at times to violent disagreement
and contradiction, extends to the literary world. Although it is in some
ways productive to generalize, as Mary Poovey does in The Proper Lady and
the Woman Writer, that “[b]y the end of the eighteenth century . . . ‘female’
and ‘feminine’ were understood by virtually all men and women to be
synonymous” (), I find Laqueur’s emphasis on the unresolved struggle
over both the meaning of the sex “woman,” and whether or not such a
distinct sex even exists, more compelling. By emphasizing the struggle
over the categories of sex and gender, rather than the struggle’s outcome
(the conflation of gender and sex, of femininity with the “natural” female
body), we can give women’s diverse perspectives greater visibility. From
prominent Enlightenment feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary
Robinson, to poets like Letitia Landon, women writers of the Romantic
period always addressed the body when they considered issues of intellect,
subjectivity, sexuality, agency, and power.
Gendered studies of the eighteenth century and of the Victorian period have for some time explored the connections between the history of
the body and literary history, and have examined the historically contingent nature of embodiment that helped shape notions of cultural gender. Londa Schiebinger’s Nature’s Body: Gender and the Making of Modern
Science examines in detail the complex ideological interests that shaped
late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century concepts of sexual difference in nature. Schiebinger’s research into botanical, sexual, and racial
classification at the turn of the nineteenth century demonstrates that

appreciating the contested and thus contingent status of the “natural”
order of sex is essential to a full understanding of the evolution of difference, and hence the discourse of political, racial, and sexual equality, in
the Romantic period. Interdisciplinary studies of science and literature,
specifically of literature and the body, are plentiful for the eighteenth
century and earlier periods; these fields have long enjoyed explorations
of the carnivalesque, the grotesque, the bawdy, and the perverse that can
make nineteenth-century evocations of the body seem impoverished indeed. Drawing on Foucault’s interrogations of the Victorian explosion in
sexual discourses, and of the relationship of such discourses to legal, penal, medical, educational, and domestic institutions, recent studies of the
body in Victorian culture and literature have examined more closely the
persistence, and contestation, of sexual difference as a natural and stable
category. The emerging consensus among historians of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century medicine emphasizes “that the medical construction


Introduction



of male and female as dichotomous terms had no foundation in ‘nature’:
it was based on ideological oppositions which are deeply entrenched in
western thought.”
These developments in the history of sexuality and the body, and
their impact on literary and cultural studies, are part of the larger theoretical sea change engendered by postmodernism’s challenges to traditional Marxist, historicist, feminist, and psychoanalytical critiques. In
feminist theory specifically, heated debates over such “constructionist”
approaches to gender and especially sex and embodiment often focus
on Foucault’s influence in these genealogical, deconstructive, and antihumanist approaches, especially given the elision of gender in his work.
Debate on Foucault’s usefulness for feminist theory and practice is ongoing, and generally centers on his concepts of resistance and power,
which are also central to my study. Foucault’s influential theory of power
as productive, not merely repressive, of bodies and subjects is seen by
some to rob women of the luxury of autonomous, rational subjectivity and agency that many men have enjoyed for centuries under the

reign of humanism. Feminist theorists like Elizabeth Grosz, Lois McNay,
and Catherine MacKinnon have argued that Foucault’s emphasis on
ever-present power leaves little room for resistance or agency, and instead intensifies the passivity of (characteristically ungendered) subjects
and bodies as they are inscribed, shaped, and punished by “technologies of the self” and corporeal discipline through diet, exercise, work,
medicine, hygiene, etc. This well-known critique of the passivity of the
Foucauldian subject of power, combined with his failure to acknowledge
the historically specific and firmly entrenched domination of women
by men, has led some feminists to conclude that “the political experience of women daily subordinated by men, by masculinity, by the social
construction of their bodies, makes resistance and change much more
complex and problematic than Foucault seems to allow.”
But, of course, there are many Foucaults, as there are many feminisms,
and a tradition of postmodern feminist theory has refined Foucauldian
resistance and found valuable tools in his genealogical method and antihumanist critique of subjects and bodies. Beyond the utopian promise
of “bodies and pleasures” that Foucault enigmatically suggested at the
end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality as an alternative, posthumanistic strategy of resisting subjection and normalization (as genital,
complementary heterosexuality), feminists have also focused on his later
writings in which he elaborated his notion of resistance. “There are no
relations of power without resistances,” writes Foucault: “the latter are