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Katherine Montwieler
kmontwie@uga.cc.uga.edu
University of Georgia
Perhaps the most radical critique of this vision of violence comes from the intersection of feminist and queer theory found in sadomasochism. The violent practices of s&m alert us to our culture's silent condoning of violence. The representation of violence in the form of sexual domination is, then, a deliberate "outing" of the violence inherent in all relationships. Emphasizing s&m's representational aspect, Califia writes: "I have no desire to own anyone on a full- time basis. This is the difference between real slavery or exploitation and S&M. I am interested in something ephemeral, pleasure, not in economic control or forced reproduction" (135). Hence, the violence between the sadist and the masochist is a performative, cathartic, creative way of working out problems such as guilt and psychological manipulation. By drawing our attention to violence, s&m practitioners force us to confront our unnamed, unnoticed, quotidian acts of violence.[2]
Yet other feminists argue that we can confront violence through literature--that through literature, we can hear the voice of the victims, the voice of the violated.[3] Remembering violence, then, like s&m's reenactment of it, is productive. In her discussion of "wimmin's experiences of suffering," Trebilcot points out that "wimmin who have been hurt in oppressive systems may have especially lucid ideas of how oppressions operate" (ix). And stories, in particular, Trebilcot argues, are a useful medium for understanding experiences, whether violent or otherwise:
Anyone can tell her story, stories may be true and made up in various proportions, they can be mainly about just one person, or about many, or about everyone, and they tell more than they say. They include analyses and show motives. They entertain, explain, connect, emancipate. Anyone can take whatever she wants from them in the process of making her own stories/realities/selves, and we can together draw on them in making cultures. For me it definitely makes more sense to talk about stories than about theories or theorizings (64).
I like Trebilcot's model of story- telling. If we understand stories as theories about violence, its effects, and its cultural representations, I believe we can understand Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in the same context. Robinson does not ignore violence or dismiss it as a male problem; rather, her constant recounting of its various manifestations reveal it to be a central concern.
Violent imagery pervades Robinson's final book of poetry. Many of her heterogeneous subjects (including abandoned children, abused wives, conscripted soldiers, enslaved Africans, and alienated Indians) are victims of violence. From the opening "All Alone" until the closing "Golfre, A Gothic Swiss Tale in Five Parts," violence is omnipresent, appearing in nearly every poem. In poems that range from the sentimental to the comic to the political, the consistent use of violence is troubling. Robinson gives her readers entertainment with an edge. Disturbing images amuse us. These lyrically violent tales do not allow us to read passively but jerk us out of complacent gratification. Following Trebilcot, Robinson's poems are also theories of violence. If s&m brings violence out in the bedroom, Lyrical Tales brings it out in the parlor.[4] Consequently, the ubiquity of violence in Lyrical Tales demands a recognition of the ubiquity of violence in our daily lives, practiced by individuals and institutions.
Robinson's own life was as marked by violence as any of the characters' she created. In addition to suffering abuse by her father as well as various lovers, she was vilified in the press. I do not claim to write a psychobiographical study of Lyrical Tales, although I concur with Stuart Curran that Robinson's own experience with abuse and abandonment influence the dark vision of her poetry.[5] Husbands whip wives, aristocrats imprison old ladies, English stab Indians and enslave Africans, armies impress young men. Certainly, Robinson "observes the outcast and the marginal from a participant's standpoint" (Curran 32). And although Robinson sometimes frames her tales with narrators, her victims also speak for themselves. Their stories are different, as their experience with violence is different. The poet speaks from and of a number of positions, thereby creating the diverse community of Lyrical Tales. This self- conscious variation in voices points to the inability of any one voice to "dominate"--and the various manifestations of violence and possible reactions to it.
Curran claims that the book's merit lies in this "abundance of voices, modes of representation, and fertile creativity [which] collide with its sense of a continual thwarting of potentiality to accomplish a thematic tension between means and ends, past and future, consummation and consumption" (26). These abundant voices struggle for power. These voices are those that tell the stories of violence- - although the narrators are not always the victims or even sympathetic to them. Again, the voices range from the sentimental "All Alone" to the comic "Deborah's Parrot" to the political "The Lascar." The presence of violence in poems that differ as widely as the Lyrical Tales do, highlights Robinson's awareness and acknowledgment of the violence in interpersonal relationships. Nearly two hundred years before Catharine MacKinnon, Pat Califia, and Joyce Trebilcot drew our attention to the ubiquity of violence in our culture, Mary Robinson realized its pervasiveness. But unlike those feminists who understand violence as a male problem, Robinson demanded that her readers understand it as a universal problem which affects everyone. Her female subjects are not just its innocent victims, but often its perpetrators. After all, Mistress Gurton hangs her cat. Robinson's attitude towards violence is subtle and complex--like Califia and Trebilcot, the poet insists we face its possible manifestations. For the rest of this paper, I intend to examine a few instances of Robinson's varied treatment of violence. In attempting to represent Robinson's multiple voices, I've selected a few poems representative of different "genres": the sentimental,[6] the comic, and the political.[7]
It seems most appropriate to begin my analysis with the book's opening poem. The violence of "All Alone" may not appear on a cursory reading of the poem. Although the community neglects the child, whether such a dearth of attention is violent is unclear. And, indeed, if acts of violence are necessarily pre- mediated, conscious acts, then the child may not suffer any directly. Alternatively, if we read violence as an "intense, turbulent, or furious and often destructive action or force" (Websters 1316), then we can understand nature as acting violently. The first speaker notes to the child that "Thy naked feet are wounded sore /With thorns that cross thy daily road.... /The rain has drench'd thee, all night long; /The nipping frost thy bosom froze" (25- 32). Nature has battered the boy's body. The child responds with a catalogue of other examples listing nature's violence towards him: "The lightning smote our cottage low.... /The blast blew strong, the torrent rose /And bore our shatter'd cot away" (98- 110). Nature is an unconscious, impersonal force that wreaks destruction on a family home and continues to harm a little boy. Robinson opens Lyrical Tales with a story of the most fundamental kind of violence. Her earth does not provide sustenance for humans but is complicit in their destruction. Thus, the "Trav'ller" who stops to talk to the child and to comfort him is opposed to Nature. This attempt at connection fails as the boy bitterly reiterates "alone" throughout the poem, ending with "'I have no kindred left, to mourn /'When I am hid in yonder grave! /Not one! to dress with flow'rs the stone;-- /Then--surely, I AM LEFT ALONE!'" (157-160). This plaintive cry is the final articulation of a child, who, Curran says, "is a totally existential figure, simply and irremediably cut off" (1994, 32). The poem, then, introduces the reader to the violent world of Lyrical Tales with a disturbing picture of nature and the inability of human beings to counteract its destructive forces.[8] The boy's compassionate interlocutor is completely unsuccessful. Robinson sets up a sentimental scene-- an orphan crying on his mother's grave-- to criticize the inefficacy of sentimentalism and to question humanity's position in a destructive universe. Nature dwarfs the traveler's sentimental response. The natural violence of the poem suggests that even if human beings stop practicing violent acts (for the army has conscripted the boy's father), violence will remain with us. Compassionate sentimentalism is not strong enough to counteract natural destruction. Even if the wanderer of "All Alone" had adopted the child, Robinson leaves us with a profound sense of spiritual loss: violence kills the soul of the "poor little lorn one." He is not hoping for salvation, but lost in material despair. Given sentimentalism's privileging of feeling as the most exquisite experience of the human condition, Robinson's use of this rhetorical strategy to describe this death of feeling is particularly poignant. Sentimentalism cannot counter despair. Furthermore, since sentimentalism often valorizes the home-- the site of compassion, nurturing, and love-- the destruction of this home shows violence at its most disastrous, invidious, and powerful within the sentimental sphere.
Mistress Deborah's domestic tale does not offer a peaceful hearth but a comic scenario which shows that violence, too, begins at home. The poem, "Deborah's Parrot," describes one woman's infidelity and her subsequent abuse. Deborah is "an ancient maiden" who owns a parrot which "Could prate, and tell what neighbors did, /And yet the saucy rogue was never chid!" (47- 48). Debby revels in the (usually false) stories her parrot tells about her neighbors. Eventually she marries ("Miss Debby's gold an husband bought" [90]) a man "giv'n to jealous rage" (95) who returns from a night of drinking to hear the parrot repeatedly cry, "Who with the Parson toy'd? O fie!" (italics Robinson's, 120). Since "cowardice and guilt.../Are the twin brothers of the soul," Debby grows doubly pale (132- 134). When Jenkins first mimics the parrot, "'Who with the parson toy'd?' he cried," we laugh. Yet as his speech and actions intensify, we grow more uneasy. "'I am no modern Spouse, dy'e see, /Gold will not gild disgrace, with me!' /Some say he seiz'd his fearful bride, /And came to blows! /Day after day, the contest dire /Augmented with resistless ire! /And many a drubbing DEBBY bought /For mischief, she her PARROT taught." Still, the tone is light, reinforced by the playful rhyme scheme. As if, since Deborah is such a despicable character, she deserves what she gets. The narrator underscores this position with a pat moral: "Thus, SLANDER turns against its maker; /And if this little Story reaches /A SPINSTER, who her PARROT teaches, /Let her a better task pursue, /And here, the certain VENGEANCE view /Which surely will, in TIME, O'ERTAKE HER" (155- 160).[9] This moral advocating physical abuse as the correct punishment for slander and/or infidelity is disturbing. If we smile while reading, we smile queasily. Whether Robinson supports this point of view is unclear. She could be mocking Jenkins's reaction, yet the moral supports him. Another way of thinking about this problematic poem is that, as Curran suggests, Robinson adopts a persona, "a gossipy and somewhat malicious spinster who is an inveterate telltale" (27), to narrate the poem. For in the poem's original publication in the Morning Post, Robinson signed it "Tabitha Bramble." She does not, however, include this pseudonym in its reprinting in Lyrical Tales. Following Curran, we could read the poem's end as a sign of society's sanction of wife abuse. Robinson forces her readers to ask if their laughter at Debby's punishment is an appropriate reaction. Robinson repeats the story of the violent, cuckolded husband later in the anthology with the poem, "The Confessor." That this story is repeated twice in a collection including altogether twenty- two poems points to the trope's familiarity. Robinson draws the reader's attention to the story's popularity: she cheats on him, he catches her, he beats her (and/or possibly her lover). Since the inclusion of two poems that tell the same story seems redundant, we must ask why both tales are included. I believe the excess of the tales gestures towards the excess of the violence within them. Robinson underscores the endurance of the misogynistic trope of the deceitful woman who must be punished with violence and the cultural approval of this practice and this story. Treating the subject humorously is one way of divesting it of power--yet Robinson appears to walk a thin line between sanctioning such behavior and criticizing it. Including the poem in Lyrical Tales without the signature "Tabitha Bramble" runs the risk of collapsing the poet with the speaker, suggesting that perhaps Robinson simply recognized the cultural value of violence and capitalized on it. But given the prevalence of rumors of her own infidelity and consequent condemnation for it, I prefer to read Robinson's laughter at the husbands' violent reactions as one way of disempowering them with the most effective, cutting way she knew how. Her weapon of choice is a humorous poem.
Robinson more overtly and more seriously criticizes the current violent social order, and, particularly, racism, with "The Lascar" and "The Negro Girl." "The Lascar" is the story of a displaced Indian, far from his native shore, who "hear[s] our wretched race deplore[d]" (I.I.6). As in "All Alone," nature conspires in the abuse and alienation of the speaker: "'For Europe's Suns, with softer dyes /'Mark Europe's favour'd progeny'" (I.VII.3- 4). In the first part of "The Lascar," the eponymous character faces violence in the forms of racism and neglect but it is not until the second part that someone actually acts violently towards him. After dreaming his mother has been stabbed to death, possibly mad from hunger, and fearing drowning, the Lascar reaches out to another "Trav'ller" who "was a fearful man- - /And next his life he priz'd his gold....[And] struggling to be free, he gave- - /A deep wound to the LASCAR Slave" (II.VI.3- 12). Unlike the victims of the comic poems, the Lascar has done nothing that warrants an angry response: "'What have I done?... /'That Heaven to me the pow'r denied /To touch the soul of man, and share /A brother's love, a brother's care; /Why is this dingy form decreed /To bear oppression's scourge and bleed?" (II.VII.5- 10). In the next line, the Lascar wonders whether there is a god "in yon Dark Heav'n." The unspoken answer is "no." Robinson does not offer a peaceful refuge to her readers apart from this violent, dark world. The senseless abuse of others again raises existential questions. Some subjects, Robinson suggests, cannot be treated humorously. The poem ends with the vision of the Lascar's body, not with a picture of a hopeful, heavenly reunion: "But, ere the sufferer they behold, /His wither'd Heart, is DEAD- - and COLD!" Unwilling to laugh at the predicament of aliens in English society, Robinson treats these victims of violence with a certain deference. Famous for her own extramarital liaisons, Robinson allows us to join her in laughter at men who overreact to their wives' indiscretions. But the institutional violence of racism, she suggests, is no laughing matter.[10]
Her own experience and dark world view certainly inform Robinson's complex treatment of violence. People act violently towards each other. Natural and supernatural forces act violently towards people. Refusing the limitations of one perspective on the phenomena, Robinson creates a multitude of voices echoing possible poetic and political positions on them. If poetry had already legitimated the condemnation of racism and slavery, violence against women presented the genre with another problem. Although we could understand the violence of Lyrical Tales as highlighting its cultural capital--that it makes good stories--and Robinson as a savvy businesswoman and student of society who recognized this marketing tactic, I prefer to see the obsessive accounts of violence as speaking to its prevalence in turn- of- the- century England. Robinson could forthrightedly condemn the violence soon-to-be-imperial powers committed against people of color, although her attention to the after-life suggests an interest beyond the political. Indeed, the Lascer's lamentation echoes the boy of "All Alone." She could comfortably condemn sentimentality's ineffectualness in dealing with violence. Yet, the more personal violence committed against English women necessitated another voice--a voice less self-righteous and more ironic. Current feminists continue to struggle with questions of how to represent violence. But unlike contemporary feminist theorists who cater to an elite group of academics, Robinson directed her poetry towards a mass audience. On the one hand, since Robinson made it into the mainstream during her lifetime, I would like to suggest that she may have been more effective in alerting her contemporaries of the prevalence of violence than MacKinnon, Califia, or Trebilcot. On the other hand, we could read Robinson's subsequent erasure from literary history as a failure of her social project. Her protest poetry was written out of literary history. The current feminist preoccupation with violence, then, speaks to Robinson's ineffectiveness. Violence was then and still is a delicate subject. We prefer to ignore it. Yet, Robinson's methodology or approach to violence--of representing it in many possible incarnations--rather than picking one and subsuming all practices under it is one that postmodern feminists should find particularly sophisticated and productive.
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_____. Perdita, The Memoirs of Mary Robinson. Ed. M.J. Levy. London: Peter Owen, 1994.
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