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John Keats's narrative poem "The Eve of Saint Agnes" reflects this medievalism in Romantic Britain's visual arts. The tableau vivant Madeline stages in her chamber re-creates the aesthetic motifs of late medieval tomb architecture and of sepulchral representations of the dead. In order to maintain the integrity of her own artistic, imaginative vision, Madeline kills herself into art. She does this by enacting rituals of life and art that are themselves designed to procure divine 'visionary' intervention. Just as young women fulfill the traditions of St. Agnes's holy day so that they may see their future husband in their dreams, tomb sculpture is designed to petition God for the deceased's place in Heaven. The ritualized performance of the female body in Madeline's tableau implicitly invites Porphyro's participatory gaze in order to criticize that same scopophilic desire that would have her killed into an object of art; she anticipates his possessive, objectifying gaze with a fixed vision of her own. Madeline stages her own death and thus asserts her authority over the text of her body. She thwarts Porphyro's challenge to her self-possession by drawing him into her sepulchral vision. Porphyro succeeds in penning his own script on Madeline's body only after he succumbs to the mandate of her imagination. In contrast to the masculinocentric trend of previous critics, which posits Porphyro as the primary actor in the narrative, I offer a reading centered on the authority of Madeline, the over determined yet self-realized "object" of male desire in the "Eve of St. Agnes."
Keats begins his narrative in the chill and darkness of an abandoned chapel, void of life save for the self-flagellating Beadsman whose wasted form figures the tolling of his death knell, already rung. On the tombs of the chapel, "The sculptured dead, on each side, seem to freeze,/ Emprison'd in black, purgatorial rails." The knights and ladies of these family monuments have been carved as priant figures, "praying in dumb orat'ries." (In Medieval tomb sculpture, the priant represents the deceased in postures of religious devotion, kneeling, with hands folded in prayer). As Wendy Steiner points out, "the pun on 'frieze' and 'freeze' parallels the sculptures themselves, which are doubly dead, because they are statues and because they are statues of the dead - the dead figures of romance knights and ladies, in fact, depicted in the act of prayer. Their dreary chill makes the Beadsman's prayers seem even more a failure of vital spirituality, again a double death - the mere static image of the deluded act of prayer 'in the dumb orat'ries' " (Steiner 69). When Madeline later stages her own funereal "frieze," she rehearses through her aesthetic "death in life" her own eventual priant figure and thus revitalizes the potential for creative expression in such static images of deluded prayer as the priants that decorate the family chapel.
The most notable feature of Madeline's private chamber clearly echoes the architectural structure and sculptural motifs of the medieval funeral monuments in the family chapel below. The scene of Madeline's tableau vivant is framed by "A casement high and triple-arch'd..../ All garlanded with carven imag'ries/ Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass/....And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,/ And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,/ A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings." Kathleen Cohen notes that carvings of fruits and flowers often adorned tombs of this period as symbols of regeneration and, by extension, resurrection. Family mottoes and emblems of genealogy graced the elaborate arches and casements that contained the sculpted representations of the deceased in order to announce the heritage and status of the family.
As Madeline kneels in prayer in front of this window she constructs herself as a priant figure, encased within the architectural design of the tomb: "Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,/ As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;/ Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,/ And on her silver cross soft amethyst...." Aesthetic trappings of death distort natural phenomena as well; even the moonlight that floods the room is colored and shaped to illuminate Madeline's tableau of death in life. When Madeline lays herself in her bed, in shroud-like "blanched linen, smooth and lavender'd," she recreates yet another sepulchral figure, that of the transi, the representation of the deceased after death, usually depicted recumbent, wrapped in only a shroud, in varying stages of decomposition. The transi is usually placed on the lowest level of the tomb, clearly figuring the interment of the deceased. While in this position, sound asleep, Madeline most suggestively articulates death. As Keats writes in his "Sonnet to Sleep," sleep is the "soft embalmer" of the night that seals the "hushed casket" of the soul. Interestingly, her passivity and stillness encourage Porphyro to extend his possessive gaze to a grasp; he materializes his visual consumption of her body in the feast he spreads before the bed.
On this night, Madeline's bed is at once a site for sex and for death, a marital bower and a death-bed or tomb. Porphyro sets the table for a lavish feast at the same level where Madeline's death-like figure rests. The consumption of these delicacies, then, figures both a necrophilic desire to possess, and a narcissistic cannibalism that involves the total absorption of the beloved into the self. The terms of sexual consummation, however, are ultimately set by Madeline herself, by the fixity of a gaze that overpowers Porphyro, despite his own well demonstrated command of a voyeuristic stare.
Porphyro hides in the "close secrecy" of Madeline's closet, an architectural feature which contains all the darkness and anonymity of a closed coffin. In the closet, "embower'd from the light," Porphyro prepares for "gazing on that bed," a gaze which anticipates his sexual encounter with Madeline. Angela, for one, equates his gaze with a sexual act, telling Porphyro that having seen Madeline undressed, preparing for bed, he "must need[s] the lady wed." Interestingly, it isn't Madeline's naked figure that captures Porphyro's fancy: he blazons instead the accouterments of her femininity, her clothes and her jewelry. Peter Brooks writes that because to achieve the goal of one's desire would result in the "death of desiring," and thus the silencing of the text (Brooks 20), "the object of attention and desire--most obviously, the person of the beloved--is not detailed in its nakedness but rather approached by way of its phenomenal presence in the world, which means by way of the clothing and accessories that adorn and mask the body. The approach to the body of the beloved may strive toward unveiling....but it also tends to become waylaid in the process of this unveiling, more interested in the lifting of the veils than in what is finally unveiled. An interest in the way, rather than simply the endpoint, is indeed virtually a definition of narrative" (Brooks 19). Accordingly, Keats suspends his text in silence when Madeline steps out of the foam of her "rich attire" and walks to her bed; we learn only that "soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,/....perplex'd she lay," and Porphyro is left gazing "upon her empty dress." Keats figures Porphyro's sexual "little death" in veiled language; he "melts" into Madeline's dream, killed into art so that she might make a place for him in her aesthetically realized vision of love and sexuality.
The tension of this scene lies in a doubled act of unveiling. Porphyro's leering, which is the ocular vehicle for Keats's narrative, undresses Madeline. The woman herself is little more than the sum of her accessories. Madeline's design, however, in staging this theatrical ritual, is to undress language, to lift the veil and expose the gap between aestheticized femininity and the identity this image conceals. Madeline's tableau vivant performs what Mary Ann Doane describes as "masquerade," which, "in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The masquerade's resistance to patriarchal positioning....lie[s] in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness, as presence-to-itself, as, precisely, imagistic. Masquerade....involves a realignment of femininity, the recovery, or more accurately, simulation, of the missing gap or distance. To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one's image....By destabilizing the image, the masquerade confounds [the] masculine structure of the look. It effects a defamiliarization of female iconography" (Doane 25-6).
Madeline's performance, then, positions her as a critic, rather than a victim, of a masculine scopophilic economy. Hers is a harsh indictment: Madeline's masquerade incorporates a death mask and evokes the funerary aesthetics of a tomb. In order to maintain the integrity of her imaginative vision, Madeline stages an aesthetic allegory of speaking death. Elizabeth Bronfen writes that "staging disembodiment as a form of escaping personal and social constraints serves to criticize those cultural attitudes that reduce the feminine body to the position of dependency and passivity, to the vulnerable object of sexual incursions" (Bronfen 142).
By killing herself into art, Madeline adheres to the visions of her dreams. When Porphyro wakes her, Madeline's wide eyes cause him to sink to his knees, "pale as a smooth-sculptured stone." Madeline draws the astonished (turned to stone) Porphyro into her tableau, into the frozen state of her de-realized world, a condition of inanimation that Keats himself longed for. In a letter to Fanny Brawne, the poet writes: "I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute" (Bush 291). Keats's longing to "possess" both Fanny and death suggests his sexualized relationship to a feminized death. This conflation of femininity and death also reveals an almost necrophilic narcissism; the poet is "half in love" with his own "easeful death" as he engenders a "lovely" female body with the universal condition of mortality. As Bronfen asserts, "part of the equation between femininity and death resides precisely in the fact that Woman as man's object of desire....is on the side of death....because she so often serves as a non-reciprocal 'dead' figure of imaginary projection, given that, in Lacan's terms, 'the whole of [man's] realization in the sexual relation comes down to fantasy' " (Bronfen 63).
Madeline, as an object of art, becomes a figure of Porphyro's "imaginary projection." With her tableau, Madeline ultimately undermines the scopophilic projection of an unwitting Porphyro. She remains, however, at the mercy of the poet's narrative. With Madeline as a self-inscribed figure of art, "The Eve of St. Agnes" can be read as an ekphrastic poem. James Heffernan proposes a model of ekphrastic poetry that accounts for the authority that Madeline invests in her aesthetic self-representation, and the ambivalent way in which the male poet engages with a feminized object of art. Heffernan writes that ekphrasis "evokes the power of the silent image even as it subjects that power to the rival authority of language," and that "the contest it stages is often powerfully gendered: the expression of a duel between male and female gazes, the voice of male speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening, of male narrative trying to overcome the fixating impact of beauty poised in space" (Heffernan 1). In "The Eve of St. Agnes," this contest plays out on a number of levels, both within the text, between Madeline and Porphyro, and extra-textually, between Madeline and Keats, the poet/narrator.
The image Madeline creates "excites both 'ekphrastic hope'--the desire for union--and the 'ekphrastic fear' of being silenced, petrified, and thus unmanned by the Medusan 'other' " (Heffernan 108). Madeline is Medusan in that her gaze represents a female power to freeze/frieze the enthralled male and "enchant, subvert, or threaten" his voice (Heffernan 108). When Porphyro awakens the sleeping Madeline, or resurrects her from her death-like stillness, the "vision of her sleep," inspired by religious meditation, remains before her eyes. Madeline's gaze, fixed on Porphyro, causes him to sink to his knees, "pale as smooth sculptured stone." Her stare astonishes Porphyro, who remains kneeling, "with joined hands and piteous eye,/ Fearing to move or speak, she look'd so dreamingly." Pained that, in reality, Porphyro's eyes aren't "spiritual and clear," his looks no longer "immortal," as they were in her vision, Madeline asks him not to leave her in the "eternal woe" of her awakened consciousness. Thus Madeline allows Porphyro to melt into her dream, to worship, like a pilgrim, at the "silver shrine" of her beauty, achieving an "ekphrastic union" on her own terms that simultaneously betrays Porphyro's voyeuristic obsessions by objectifying him as a piece of stone.
The male narrator's, or Keats's, act of engendering dialogue with a female art object reveals a violent impulse. The trajectory of the poem "repeatedly threatens to rape the fixed beauty of visual art [Madeline's tableau] with the language of narrative" (Heffernan 114). But where Porphyro, and by extension, Keats himself, read Madeline as a hieroglyph, the image as the woman, Madeline's frieze is an act of authorship, of self-realization; her reading of herself plays on the distance she establishes between "tableau" and "vivant," between the artistic representation and the life itself. She is not a "fixed beauty"; through her image and her voice Madeline articulates her resistance to the threat Porphyro poses within the text and the threat Keats poses extra-textually. Her speech comes at the moment of her awakening, and with her voice she further "hoodwinks" Porphyro, playing on his voyeuristic fantasies of consumption, in order to write her own ending to the story her sepulchral image embodies. Madeline's words point to her betrayal, her deception at the hands of Porphyro, whose leering eyes in life are anything but "spiritual and clear," as they were in her vision. "No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine!" Madeline cries, "thou forsakest a deceived thing."
Through speech, the act of reading her own image, Madeline crosses the line between visual and verbal representation. In this transgressive act Madeline's voice "preempts the interrogating, narrating voice of the male speaker"(Heffernan 115). Madeline's last line in the poem expresses, at best, a sense of resignation about her fate with Porphyro. In her awakened state, Madeline likens herself to "a dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing." Although Porphyro succeeds in robbing Madeline's nest of her "sweet self," clearly the achievement of his iconophilic desire results in the death of his desiring. Keats's narrative loses its erotic tension, and the poem moves to a close in the atmosphere of Madeline's sepulchral allegory. The two "glide like phantoms" through the dark, silent house, while the Baron and his guests have nightmares of coffin-worms. The end of the poem is ambiguous, and clearly doesn't bode well for the couple. Keats writes "and they are gone: ay, ages long ago/ These lovers fled away into the storm." The poem ends where it began, with the neglected Beadsman praying in "his ashes cold," and as a result the sense of closure is one of entombment. The resolution of the narrative hermetically seals the poem in a "hushed casket."
Porphyro's misinterpretation of Madeline's sepulchral tableau, his mis-recognition of the female visionary as merely a vision, points to Keats's misplaced trust in the "eternal present of pure being" that a feminine aesthetic suggests (Heffernan 114). "The Eve of Saint Agnes" points to the bankruptcy of an aesthetic vision that would reduce the feminine to the status of icon, and thus deny women artistic and authorial agency. Madeline's tableau vivant recalls Michelangelo's allegorical figure of Night in the Medici chapel, and the words he attributes to her: "It is sweet to sleep but even sweeter to be of stone. While evil and dishonor last, it is my blessing not to see, not to feel. Therefore, do not awaken me. Hush! speak softly" (Hagstrum 74).
Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Bush, Douglas, ed. Selected Poems and Letters by John Keats. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.
Cohen, Kathleen. Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge Press, 1991.
Hagstrum, Jean. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Heffernan, James. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashberry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Penny, Nicholas. Church Monuments in Romantic England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Steiner, Wendy. Pictures of Romance: Forms Against Context in Painting and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Stillinger, Jack, ed. John Keats: Complete Poems. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.