TY - JOUR
T1 - Living to Labour, Labouring to Live: The Problem of Suicide in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets
AU - Parisot, Eric
PY - 2015/12
Y1 - 2015/12
N2 - In her Elegiac Sonnets, Charlotte Smith presents the reader with a suffering poetic persona, one heavily burdened by a melancholic longing for death as a release from the ills of the world. Although this image of a despairing sentimental heroine cultivates a perception that this persona, or even Smith herself, harbours suicidal intentions, this essay argues that such desires remain inert throughout the sonnet sequence. In comparing Smith's imagining of Werther's suicidal experience – as articulated in a five-sonnet sequence within the Elegiac Sonnets – with the envisioned dejection of Smith's poetic persona, it is arguable that Smith is, instead, careful to delineate the ways in which these respective experiences diverge, and how the persistence of reason in particular, as both a blessing and a curse, prevents Smith's speaker from following Werther to the grave. Finally, it is a further reminder that (literary) suicide, often seen as the quintessentially transcendent Romantic destiny, was not a viable option for Romantic female writers who aspired to sympathetic identification and elegiac remembrance.
AB - In her Elegiac Sonnets, Charlotte Smith presents the reader with a suffering poetic persona, one heavily burdened by a melancholic longing for death as a release from the ills of the world. Although this image of a despairing sentimental heroine cultivates a perception that this persona, or even Smith herself, harbours suicidal intentions, this essay argues that such desires remain inert throughout the sonnet sequence. In comparing Smith's imagining of Werther's suicidal experience – as articulated in a five-sonnet sequence within the Elegiac Sonnets – with the envisioned dejection of Smith's poetic persona, it is arguable that Smith is, instead, careful to delineate the ways in which these respective experiences diverge, and how the persistence of reason in particular, as both a blessing and a curse, prevents Smith's speaker from following Werther to the grave. Finally, it is a further reminder that (literary) suicide, often seen as the quintessentially transcendent Romantic destiny, was not a viable option for Romantic female writers who aspired to sympathetic identification and elegiac remembrance.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079757049&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/lic3.12286
DO - 10.1111/lic3.12286
M3 - Article
SN - 1741-4113
VL - 12
SP - 660
EP - 666
JO - Literature Compass
JF - Literature Compass
IS - 12
ER -