Sexing the Romance: the Erotic Violence of the Della Cruscans

Abstract

William Gifford’s intemperate responses to English Delia Cruscanism, The Baviad and Maeviad, have influenced readers of this poetry ever since — or rather, non-readers, since Gifford’s jeremiad has taken the place of the original for most. As Jerome McGann points out, however, Gifford’s condemnation rests on a more thorough understanding of the dynamics of the poetry than its deeply negative, scurrilous, and potentially libellous tone makes enlightened modern readers comfortable acknowledging.² Amid Gifford’s indignant reactionism, in his descriptions of poetic cuckolding, ‘obscene’ imagery and ‘crude conception[s]’, his completely accurate statement stands out: ‘the two "great luminaries of the age" [Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda³], as Mr. Bell calls them, fell desperately in love with each other’ (Baviad and Maeviad, xii). Delia Cruscan poetry, in its English incarnation, charts a romance in terminology that offends the sensibilities of sensibility: it is too physical, too open, too desiring, too expressive. Most dangerously, it allows for, even encourages, the poeticising of erotic attraction. Readers of The World in 1787–8 watched breathlessly as Delia Crusca and Anna Matilda fell in, and then out of, love; the serialisation of their romance was then packed up and produced in book form in The British Album, first in 1788 but going through several editions until 1794.⁴