Cato's Tears

Ellison, Julie

doi:10.1353/elh.1996.0023

Cited by 26 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Race and gender meet in poems about empire and slavery and by writers of divergent persuasions. In Julie Ellison's phrase, “the marginalization of Indians and women creates a melancholy overlap between race and gender.” Authors such as Addison and Thomson fuse the themes of “liberty, love, and suffering,” she says, “in the figures of erotic aliens whose racial difference is also an emotional difference” (571). Attempted suicide serves a similar purpose in Hannah More's “The Sorrows of Yamba, or the Negro Woman's Lamentation” (1795) and Charlotte Dacre's “The Poor Negro Sadi” (1805), where the rescue of the slaves paradoxically enforces their captivity, driving home the cruelty of slavery.…”

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“this winged nature fraught”: Suicide and Agency in Women's Poetry

Higonnet

2015

Literature Compass

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This essay focuses on representations of female suicide by Romantic poets Felicia Hemans and Mary Robinson. In short lyric narratives, the two poets exploited themes of maternal, revolutionary, and Sapphic suicide. Their literary representations of women's voluntary death can both draw from and generate narratives of political resistance: the repudiation of slavery, of empire, of tyranny. Female suicide may also invoke discourses about the nature and function of poetic voice, genre, and authorship. Selected fatal moments point toward the political and metapoetic implications of gesture and voice. In the penultimate sonnet of Robinson's Sappho and Phaon, for example, the classical poet-the tenth museref lects upon her impending death. Perched on the Leucadian rock, Sappho gazes up at the sky, and not down toward her watery grave;Robinson's imagery suggests soaring f light rather than precipitous fall. Sappho anticipates posthumous fame more triumphant, more transcendent, than that which she achieved in life: then shall "loftier passions prompt the loftier theme!" In this way Sappho's suicidal genius stands in for the neglected genius of Romantic women writers; it figures the self-ref lexive, paradoxical condition of the female writer at once legitimated and effaced by the authorial role. For these authors, the rhetoric and imagery of female suicide does not provide textual closure, nor does it determine, finally, a poem's meaning. Rather, suicide opens up the text. This paper focuses on two Romantic women poets' representations of female suicide. In both lyric and epic modes, Mary Robinson and Felicia Hemans exploited themes of maternal, revolutionary, and Sapphic suicide. A substantial body of criticism has been written about these poems, as well as about the related topic of the "female sublime." It is generally assumed that the female sublime differs from the male sublime (Yaeger, Freeman, Wright); in turn, a gendered sublime has been implicated in the representation of suicide (Thomas, Higonnet). For some readers, the voice of the female suicide is self-divided and in some sense defeated: grief and despair overwhelm the woman's identity as a poet (Lipking 82, Leighton 3). Ruth Salvaggio has suggested that "the very idea of woman became a metaphor and figure of the essence of exclusion -of not being, of absence," whose locus is "the repressed, the censured" (3, 5). While the tension between abandoned lover and woman poet is generally understood as resolved in death by the silencing of the poet, radical self-denial may be balanced by selfconfidence in the woman poet's art. Kari Lokke argues that where isolation seems most acute, when the female poet is most lovelorn, her disappointment "becomes a catalyst for the cultivation of heightened political, spiritual, and historical awareness" (Tracing 7). The voice of the poet reaches out to a "collective" selfhood. We might say that the aporia of suicide lines up with the aporia of the sublime, where blockage triggers transcendence.Such speculations may rest on a few ...

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“this winged nature fraught”: Suicide and Agency in Women's Poetry

Higonnet

2015

Literature Compass

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“…Indeed, as Julie Ellison has argued, the relationship between law and tears in America has been potent enough that dominant models of masculinity, family and community have been built around it. 24 Americans' apparent capacity for 'natural' and profound sentiment has been an important point of differentiation from British political and cultural norms since the late eighteenth century. Yet sentiment's dependence upon shared social values for signifi cance means that it has as often been an indication of Anglo-American community, of the migratory capacity and trans-national force of emotion and affect.…”

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Anglo‐American: Artistic Exchange between Britain and the USA

Corbett¹,

Monks²

2011

Art History

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Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

MacDonald

2002

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Joyce Green MacDonald discusses the links between women's racial, sexual, and civic identities in early modern texts. She examines the scarcity of African women in English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the racial identity of the women in the drama and also that of the women who watched and sometimes wrote the plays. The coverage also includes texts from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, by, among others, Shakespeare, Jonson, Davenant, the Countess of Pembroke, and Aphra Behn. MacDonald articulates many of her discussions of early modern women's races through a comparative method, using insights drawn from critical race theory, women's history, and contemporary disputes over canonicity, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism. Seeing women as identified by their race and social standing as well as by their sex, this book will add depth and dimension to discussions of women's writing and of gender in Renaissance literature.

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Cato's Tears

Cited by 26 publications

References 19 publications

“this winged nature fraught”: Suicide and Agency in Women's Poetry

“this winged nature fraught”: Suicide and Agency in Women's Poetry

Anglo‐American: Artistic Exchange between Britain and the USA

Women and Race in Early Modern Texts

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