Felicia Hemans pp 55-73 | Cite as
The Triumph of Voice in Felicia Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary
Abstract
Like Charlotte Brontë’s Mr Rochester, the Spaniard who narrates Felicia Hemans’s epic The Forest Sanctuary (1825) is the male creature of a female creator, who sees nature and books indirectly, by way of the female voice. The blind Mr Rochester, disoriented by the loss of visual references, is dependent upon Jane’s living voice; Hemans’s Spaniard, essentially solitary in a foreign wilderness, depends for his orientation upon remembered, mostly female, voices. In The Forest Sanctuary, her most ambitious work and her professed favorite, Hemans herself may help to make straight the way for the current recovery of female voices, for she has constructed a haunting parable about the power of voices, about the importance of remembering them, and about the hazards and temptations of silence.
Keywords
Female Voice Task Back Plural Pronoun Physical Suffering Ambitious WorkPreview
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Notes and References
- 1.Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 397.Google Scholar
- 2.He is haunted by her brother Alvar, too, of course — but even Alvar is rather feminized: the Spaniard remembers him most clearly not as his fellow soldier but as his nurse — ‘Alvar bending o’er me — from the night / Covering me with his mantle’ (Lxxix.7-8).Google Scholar
- 3.Dale M. Bauer, Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 4. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.Google Scholar
- 4.Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 63.Google Scholar
- 5.My text for The Forest Sanctuary is Felicia Hemans, The Forest Sanctuary: and Other Poems (London: J. Murray, 1825). This text has been reprinted in a facsimile edition, with an introduction by Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland, 1978). The poem is divided into two books, each made up of nine-line stanzas numbered with Roman numerals; the lines are not numbered consecutively in any edition 1 have seen. I will use this somewhat cumbersome numbering system throughout, as the most natural and convenient.Google Scholar
- 6.Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism & Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 132. Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.Google Scholar
- 7.Like Lady Macbeth, Leonor has an indistinct number of children. The son who survives with his father to the end of the story seems to be the only one, but here, perhaps for the purposes of the generalization, Leonor’s children (like Hemans’s) are plural.Google Scholar
- 8.This more sinister possibility accords better with Marlon Ross’s reading of the incident in The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), a reading fundamentally unlike my own. Ross presents Inez as decisively refusing. This is the way Alvar and Theresa seem to interpret their sister’s death — but if the knight did not present an impossibly tempting alternative, Inez would not fall dead at his feet.Google Scholar
- 9.Leonor’s dying words, among the few spoken words quoted in the poem, repeat this model of artistic soothing: ‘And I have lulled him to his smiling rest / Once more!’ (II.lv.2–3).Google Scholar
- 10.Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 24.Google Scholar
- 11.Claudia L. Johnson, jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 18.Google Scholar
- 12.‘Prefatory Notice’, The Poetical Works of Mrs. Hemans (New York: Worthing-ton, 1884), p. 24.Google Scholar