Literature and Theatre
Injured minds returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism by offering a close look at the novels of five early Romantic-period women authors. In an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness, Weiss maintains that Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, and Mary Hays created novels that exposed how medical models for mental disease and the popular sentimental figure of the love-mad maid allowed men to hide their culpability for injuring women. Weiss demonstrates that in these novels, patriarchal structures of control, acts of abuse, and the educational and sentimental legacy of Rousseau, rather than inherent female weakness and the supposedly aberrant female body, are responsible for the protagonists’ dangerous hysteric and melancholic illnesses. Making careful distinctions among authors, Weiss shows how Maria Edgeworth and Amelia Opie shared their radical contemporaries’ critiques of misogynistic medical and sentimental models of female madness, but resisted blaming men and patriarchal social systems entirely for women’s mental afflictions. Instead, these more mainstream authors explored less strongly gendered and less victim-based models of causality, such as trauma, misplaced passions, erroneous associations, and remorse. Weiss shows that these novels presented ways of understanding madness that were more modern than those available through contemporary medical or sentimental texts. Taken as a whole, Injured minds suggests that this presentation of female madness furthered the development of the psychologically complex heroine of the nineteenth-century novel. In so doing, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women’s mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.
Beginning with a discussion of Baldwin’s home in the south of France, where he lived for the last seventeen years of his life, Chapter 2 explores the role of place and home for a writer who described himself as a ‘transatlantic commuter’, as he shuttled back and forth from the US to France, where he lived for much of his adult life. The chapter weaves in accounts of Douglas Field’s father, reflecting on the meaning of home for a man who grew up in several different countries but who is now unable to leave his care home in north Shropshire, England. Chapter 2 considers how much of Baldwin’s writing is preoccupied with place and home, from the titles of his essays such as No Name in the Street (1972) and that of his novel Giovanni’s Room (1956). And while Baldwin spent most of his adult life in France, while also intermittently spending a decade in Turkey, the chapter explores how and why little of his writing is set outside the US. The chapter also recounts the author’s trips following in Baldwin’s footsteps, when he travelled to New York, the south of France and Switzerland, moments which become reflections on home in the American writer’s life and work, but also what this concept means to Douglas Field’s father.
Reiterations and quasi-repetitions of words play dangerously close to dull redundancy; they are potential ‘dead ends’. This chapter’s four sections, the first on repeating figures and the latter three on tautologies, look at the expressions of language’s limitations in Hill’s poetry, focusing particularly on The Triumph of Love (1998), The Orchards of Syon (2002), and The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (2019). With the help of a Chestertonian allusion to Aristotle’s sense of meson, or balance, the first section argues that repeating figures can present discrete rebalances of language, which aim to transcend the corrupt histories of words. The next three sections are devoted to tautologies, in which a superficial balance of words is already evident. After a preliminary investigation of the link between tautology, infancy, and speechlessness, with reference to Tennyson, the second section claims that tautologies, for Hill especially, are the closest thing in language to expressions of ‘mute desire’. The third section examines the ‘evenness’ of tautologies, understood as necessary for the potential transcendence of their expression; and the fourth section, following this logic of tautologies to its intended end, considers Hill’s tautology as a childlike plea to God for reconciliation.
Lastly, there are two short ‘Endnotes’, which constitute a last reflection on the book’s intentions; and on the ends of Hill’s poetry taken as a whole.
The fifth and final chapter is on the forms of Hill’s poems: do they arrive at ends; and if so what are they? The chapter’s introductory section attends to the notion of the ‘ideal’ in Hill’s thought. Quoting at length from remarks Hill made in 2008 and in 2016 at his last public reading, it relates the ideal shaping of the poem to what Hill calls its ‘necessary closure’. The chapter goes on to examine four of Hill’s forms: unrhymed sonnets; versets; clavics; and sapphics. The first two of these appear in Hill’s early work (1968–1971), the latter two in his late work (2007–2012). Hill’s use of each is distinctive; together, they illustrate Hill’s resourceful and attentive handling of various forms to reach, or deflect from, a sense of closure. There is a closing discussion of the thought of ‘yearning’, which is taken as fundamental to Hill’s end-directed language and forms. What F. H. Bradley calls ‘the idea of perfection’ is deemed an essential stimulus not only of the sapphic’s short final line but of Hill’s poetry as a whole. The chapter ends with a summary of the nature of forms in Hill’s early and late work, including the pointedly unbounded end of his posthumous collection, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin.
‘The lure of conclusion with no notion where to begin’. The idea of the end is an essential motivic force, even a place to begin, in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016). During his life, many echoed Harold Bloom’s description of Hill as the ‘greatest living poet in the English language’. Yet little has been written about the ends that Hill’s poems forge; or those that they seek. This book shows that Hill’s poems are characteristically ‘end-directed’. They tend towards consummations of all kinds: from the marriages of meanings in puns, or of words in repeating figures and rhymes, to syntactical and formal finalities. The recognition of failure to reach such ends provides its own impetus to Hill’s work. This study of Hill’s ends is, appropriately, the first to take account of Hill’s last works: not only the concluding books collected in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, but also The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (2019). The book is a significant contribution to the study of Hill, offering a new thematic reading of his entire body of work. By using Hill’s work as an example, the book also touches on questions of poetry’s ultimate value. What do the technical and formal features of poems entail for their aesthetic finishedness; and for their final worth? What are poetry’s ends and where does it wish to end up?
The book begins with a quotation from one of Hill’s early notebooks, which induces a short meditation on the myths surrounding words. The second section discusses the critical context of the book; and the third gives a sense of the book’s uses of the word end, referring to a few writers whose thoughts on poetry’s purposes are relevant both to Hill’s writing and to the book’s approach: namely Aristotle, Sidney, and David Jones (via Rowan Williams). The fourth and fifth sections explain the structure of the book and the thoughts behind its title.
The first chapter is on Hill’s puns. The pun is in one sense a very minimal linguistic end, bringing together disparate meanings or connotations in a single word or phrase. The first section of the chapter cites a wide range of puns from Hill’s poetry in order to establish the characteristics of the figure for Hill and how these change over the course of his career. The second section begins by considering the implications of the pun’s ‘ambiguity’, its capacity to represent doubled or coupled ‘reality’. Referring to Empson, Weil, and T. S. Eliot, it asks why an ‘accurate’ ambiguity may be poetically and ethically desirable; and discusses the ‘[r]e-cognition’ that may follow. The final section of the chapter analyses Hill’s puns in light of two persistent themes, which themselves have affinities with puns: sexual love and alchemy. Looking predominantly at poems from Scenes from Comus (2005) and Oraclau | Oracles (2007–2012), and noting the debts owed to both Donne and Jung, this section regards the pun as both witness and minister to Hill’s ‘alchemic-carnal’ marriages of meanings.
The third chapter deals with Hill’s rhymes. The rhyme is a significant end-point of poetry, coupling words that are often otherwise unfamiliar to each other. This chapter starts by reflecting on rhyme’s importance in the context of Hill’s ‘antiphonal’ poetics, and reviews some of the suspicions of rhyme’s ‘easy mellifluousness’, citing Stevens and Pope. The second section asks how Hill’s rhyme might be influenced by, and how it differs from, the suggestions of T. S. Eliot and the example of Allen Tate. A survey of rhyme in Hill’s poetry is offered in the third section, with a distinction drawn between the work before and after the 1985 Collected Poems. The culminating fourth and fifth sections of the chapter posit two paradoxical kinds of rhyme in Hill’s work: the impossible and the inevitable. Admitting that it is a question of emphasis rather than strict definition, the chapter studies at length two poems from Hill’s early work, ‘The Pentecost Castle’ (1978) and ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ (1968), as examples of impossible rhyming; and several poems from Al Tempo de’ Tremuoti (2007–2012) as examples of inevitable rhyming. The chapter ends with a short suggestion of the relation between rhyme and Hill’s idea of equity.
Beginning the book’s perspectival ascent to the larger structural features of poetry, the fourth chapter, on syntaxes, examines the ends Hill seeks at the level of the sentence. It takes A Treatise of Civil Power (2007) as its point of reference for an analysis of the tension between order and disorder in Hill’s syntax. It notes the ‘[u]rge to unmake | all wrought finalities’ in the collection’s last poem, ‘Nachwort’, and regards this urge as essential to the troubled and diverse energies of Hill’s syntaxes. The metatextual rhetoric of language undressing or undoing itself in the later poems sheds light on the struggle for ‘plain speaking’ in Hill. The remaining two sections of the chapter evaluate one of the key orchestrators of Hill’s syntax: his punctuation. The second section looks at poems of ‘limited punctuation’ in Canaan (1996), arguing that these, somewhat surprisingly, provide some of the clearest examples of ‘satisfactory’, conclusive endings in Hill’s work. The third section assesses the punctuational changes made between revisions of Odi Barbare (2007–2012), reading the helpful additions of punctuation marks in the latter version as revealing a deepened ‘trust’ in syntax in Hill’s late poetry.