Felicia Hemans pp 181-195 | Cite as

Gender and Modernity in The Abencerrage: Hemans, Rushdie, and ‘the Moor’s Last Sigh’

  • Nanora Sweet
Chapter

Abstract

Felicia Hemans’s 1819 verse tale The Abencerrage and Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel The Moor’s Last Sigh share the motif of ‘the Moor’s last sigh’, a trace of masculine emotion displaced by an emasculating taunt: ‘Thou doest well to weep, like a woman, over the loss of that kingdom which thou knowest not how to defend and die for like a man’, says Boabdil’s dowager mother in a note to The Abencerrage.2 For Hemans and Rushdie, modernity begins with the defeat of Islam in 1492 by the West’s first world empire and begins on a feminizing note. As a motif ‘the Moor’s last sigh’ trades in reversals of gender and culture, the turning of weakness to strength and strength to weakness. In the years after Waterloo, ‘the Moor’s last sigh’ signaled British advances in the Mediterranean under an already-Orientalized Regent. In the post-Soviet era, it reappears as the West pursues unfinished business with Islam under a sexually-scandalized American President.

Keywords

Unfinished Business Poetical Work Rough Parity Satallie Verse Unrequited Love 
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Notes and References

  1. 1.
    Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 1995 (New York: Vintage-Random, 1997), p. 80. Subsequent references to the novel will be to this edition.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Felicia Hemans, The Poetical Works of Felicia Hanaus (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliot, 1836), p. 127 n. 35.Google Scholar
  3. All references to Hemans’s poetry will be to this double-columned edition, where The Abencerrage occupies pp. 109–27. For another version of ‘the sigh’, see Letitia Landon, ‘The Sultana’s Remonstrance]’, The Poetical Works of Letitia E. Landon, ed. William B. Scott (London: Routledge, [1880]), p.Google Scholar
  4. 3.
    For instance, in Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991) Jane Miller suggests that Said’s work is short-circuited by his dismay at the feminization entailed in Orientalism (p. 118). See Said’s response to feminist critics in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Race and Class, 26.2(1985), p. 12.Google Scholar
  5. 4.
    As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes, there is a disabling misogyny in Rushdie; specifically, in his novel Shame,’ his women seem powerful only as monsters, of one sort or another’: ‘Reading the Satanic Verses’, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 223.Google Scholar
  6. 5.
    Regarding Byron’s female audience and Hemans’s engagement with it, see William St Clair, ‘The Impact of Byron’s Writings: An Evaluative Approach’, in Byron: Augustan and Romantic, ed. Andrew Rutherford (Basingstoke: Mac-millan, 1990), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar
  7. 6.
    See Paul A. Cantor, ‘Tales of the Alhambra: Rushdie’s Use of Spanish History in The Moor’s Last Sigh’, Studies in the Novel 29 (1997), pp. 323–41, on the novel’s ‘hybridity’ and modernity.Google Scholar
  8. 7.
    For an unveiling of Granadine ‘consummation’ as the triumph of Western cynicism, see Rushdie’s ‘Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship, Santa Fé;, AD 1492’, in East, West: Stories (New York: Pantheon, 1994), pp. 105–19.Google Scholar
  9. 8.
    Or when longer poems, those most readable within American feminism. Note these (different) Chodorovian readings of Hemans’s Reconquest drama The Siege of Valencia: Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 275–85Google Scholar
  10. and Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 135–41.Google Scholar
  11. 9.
    On Romantic women poets as analytical, critical users of learned discourse, see Isobel Armstrong, ‘The Gush of the feminine: How Can We Read Women’s Poetry of the Romantic Period?’ Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, eds Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995), pp. 13–32.Google Scholar
  12. 10.
    A full study of the Hispano-Moresque in Hemans would include her other Iberian work, The Siege of Valencia, The Songs of the Cid, The Forest Sanctuary,’ Moorish Bridal Song’, ‘The Coronation of Inez de Castro’, and so on.Google Scholar
  13. 11.
    On Romanticism’s ‘deeply gendered aesthetics’ of beauty and sublimity, I concur with Armstrong, p. 17.Google Scholar
  14. 12.
    See María Soledad Carrasco-Urgoiti on ‘the courageous and enamored Moor vis-à-vis his sympathetic but sentimentally less vulnerable Castilian counterpart’: The Moorish Novel (Boston: Twayne-Hall, 1976), p. 102.Google Scholar
  15. For further study of The Abencerrage and Spanish Orientalism, see Diego Saglia’s Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), Chapter Three. Saglia cites a previous version of my essay, and I in turn recommend his detailed study of the Hispano-Moresque and its role in British literary politics.Google Scholar
  16. 13.
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Remorse, in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), pp. 812–83.Google Scholar
  17. 14.
    Ginès Pérez de Hita, The Civil Wars of Granada [Part I], was translated by Thomas Rodd (London: Ostell) in 1803: Hemans cites the work in its Spanish form and draws on Parts 1 and 2. See Shasta M. Bryant, introduction, Guerras Civiles de Granada 1, by Ginès Pérez de Hita (Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1982), pp. ix–xxiiGoogle Scholar
  18. and Gerhart Hoffmeister, ‘Exoticism: Granada’s Alhambra in European Romanticism’, in his European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), pp. 113–26.Google Scholar
  19. 15.
    See my ‘History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful: Hemans and the Post-Napoleonic Moment’, in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, eds Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 170–84.Google Scholar
  20. 16.
    As Alan Liu has argued, history and gender are liminal in this Claudean aesthetic: Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 61–137.Google Scholar
  21. 17.
    For instance, Coleridge’s Zegri widow/assassin in Remorse senses her own sublimity with ‘More than a woman’s spirit’ (V.i. 245). Hemans may also have drawn on Byron’s Maid of Saragoza who defended her people when her lover could not (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Lliv-lxiv). See Carrasco-Urgoiti (pp. 124–44) who describes Pérez de Hita’s ‘common people’, especially women, as ‘either sublime or inhumanly cruel’ (p. 129).Google Scholar
  22. 18.
    My translation; see Hemans (p. 109.1).Google Scholar
  23. 19.
    The poem features headnotes and epigraphs from Sismondi, Pérez de Hita, Alfieri, and Pindemonte; among the footnotes, ten from travel literature; six from Gaerras Civiles; two from another account in Spanish of the fall of Granada; three from Gibbon’s The Histoiy of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; two from Southey’s The Chronicle of the Cid; and the balance literary allusions, linguistic glosses, and the like.Google Scholar
  24. 20.
    Hemans, pp. 123–4 n. 5–6, 111.1. Presumably Konstantin Volney, Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie.Google Scholar
  25. 21.
    William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar II.i. 230, The Complete Works, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, 1948) p. 824. The Shakespearean overtones in this play could extend to a reading of its revenge-bound hero’s name as Ham(l)et, with Zayda a reconstructed Ophelia.Google Scholar
  26. 22.
    The Vision of Don Roderick, in The Complete Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900), p. 215.Google Scholar
  27. 23.
    Presumably Jean François Bourgoing, Travels in Spain (London: Robinson, 1789).Google Scholar
  28. 24.
    Ann Radcliffe, A journey Made in the Summer of 1794 through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany … Obseirations … of the Lakes, 1795 (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1975), pp. 266–7.Google Scholar

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© Nanora Sweet 2001

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  • Nanora Sweet

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