Tales of the Female Lover: The Poetics of Romantic Desire in P. J. Harvey’s To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire?

Girodet, Catherine

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_9

Catherine Girodet⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ((PASTMULI))

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Abstract

P.J. Harvey dwells on the darker end of the independent rock spectrum, testifying both to a dark Romantic sensibility and to a Gothic mindset. The Romantic dimension of her music has remained unchartered, leaving a critical gap that seems all the more startling as the love motif features high in Harvey’s repertoire, notably on the albums To Bring You My Love (1995) and Is This Desire? (1998), her two odysseys of desire and self-damnation. This chapter analyzes the interplay between the modalities of love as agony on Harvey’s two albums and in English Romantic poetry. The aim of this chapter is to probe Harvey’s independent rock idiolect for a Romantic scope by examining its structural and aesthetic intersections with Romanticism.

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Notes

1.
David Punter , The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980), 405.
2.
Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 2014), 8.
3.
Botting , Gothic, 7.
4.
William Wordsworth, “Preface, 1800 Version,” 286–314, in Lyrical Ballads, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2005).
5.
Lori Burns and Mélisse Lafrance, Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music (New York: Routledge, 2002), 170.
6.
Quentin J. Schultze et al., eds., Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and the Electronic Media (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 1990, 164.
7.
Lawrence Grossberg, “Is there Rock After Punk?”, in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 111–123.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 291–300.
10.
Lawrence Grossberg, 111–123.
11.
M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt-Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 9th ed. (Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009).
12.
Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1992), 3.
13.
Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, eds., The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 338.
14.
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1970).
15.
Andrea K. Henderson, Romanticism and the Painful Pleasure of Modern Life (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7.
16.
Geoffrey Galt-Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).
17.
Abrams and Galt -Harpham, “Neoclassic and Romantic.”
18.
P.J. Harvey, “Angelene,” in Is This Desire?, Island Records CID 8076/524 563-2, 1998, compact disc.
19.
P.J. Harvey, “Teclo,” in To Bring You My Love, Island Records CID 8035, 524 085-2, 1995, compact disc.
20.
P.J. Harvey, “C’mon Billy,” in To Bring You My Love, Island Records CID 8035, 524 085-2, 1995, compact disc.
21.
P.J. Harvey, “Send His Love to Me,” in To Bring You My Love, Island Records CID 8035, 524 085-2, 1995, compact disc.
22.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream,” in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 251.
23.
Henderson , Romanticism, 8.
24.
P.J. Harvey, “Teclo.”
25.
P.J., Harvey, “To Bring You My Love,” in To Bring You My Love, Island Records CID 8035, 524 085-2, 1995, compact disc.
26.
P.J. Harvey, “The Dancer,” in To Bring You My Love, Island Records CID 8035, 524 085-2, 1995, compact disc.
27.
P.J. Harvey, “Meet ze Monsta,” in To Bring You My Love, Island Records CID 8035, 524 085-2, 1995, compact disc.
28.
Henderson , Romanticism, 7.
29.
Praz, Romantic Agony, 26.
30.
Cited in Henderson , 1: William Hazlitt, Liber Amoris or the New Pigmalion, intro. Michael Neve (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), 12–13.
31.
P.J. Harvey, “The Wind,” in Is This Desire?, Island Records CID 8076/524 563-2, 1998, compact disc.
32.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson , and Raimonda Modiano (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), I.60-1.
33.
Henderson , Romanticism, 10.
34.
P.J. Harvey, “Catherine,” in Is This Desire?, Island Records CID 8076/524 563-2, 1998, compact disc.
35.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery,” in Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary W. Shelley (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824), 139–140.
36.
Praz, Romantic Agony, 27.
37.
Charlotte Smith, “Sonnet XXI: Supposed to be Written by Werther,” in British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), lns. 5–8, 13–14.
38.
P.J. Harvey, “Catherine.”
39.
P.J. Harvey, “The Garden,” in Is This Desire?, Island Records CID 8076/524 563-2, 1998, compact disc.
40.
P.J. Harvey, “The River,” in Is This Desire?, Island Records CID 8076/524 563-2, 1998, compact disc.
41.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” IV.232-5.
42.
P.J. Harvey, “Teclo.”
43.
P.J. Harvey, “The Sky Lit Up,” in Is This Desire?, Island Records CID 8076/524 563-2, 1998, compact disc.
44.
P.J. Harvey, “Teclo.”
45.
P.J. Harvey, “The Dancer.”
46.
Ibid.
47.
Ibid.
48.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
49.
Botting , Gothic, 7–8.
50.
Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art (London: Associated University Press, 1982).
51.
William Wordsworth, The Excursion, 1814, in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (New York: Oxford UP), IV. 1146–7.

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Univ Paul Valéry Montpellier, Montpellier, France
Catherine Girodet

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Mississippi College, Clinton, MS, USA
James Rovira

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Girodet, C. (2018). Tales of the Female Lover: The Poetics of Romantic Desire in P. J. Harvey’s To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire?. In: Rovira, J. (eds) Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_9

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_9
Published: 30 March 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72687-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72688-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

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