ࡱ> Y bjbjWW ^d==/I ]8& b b b fffff.<RRyyy;;;;;;;$=?<b yuyyy<K7 RK7K7K7y b ;ff y;K7K7 ;:;,, 6b ;D_LKff6L; CHARLOTTE MEW : DISPLACED PERSON Displacement and division of the female self in the poetry of Charlotte Mew By Joan Bernadette Slattery M9122252 B. A. (Hons.) The Open University, 1993 Long Dissertation Submitted for The Open University M. A. in Literature, A819 September, 1998. No part of this dissertation has previously been submitted for a degree or for any other qualification of The Open University or of any other university or institution and has been written entirely by myself, Joan Bernadette Slattery. Permission to quote any part of this document must be obtained from the author. ABSTRACT This study focuses on modes of displacement and division in the poetry of Charlotte Mew, a late Victorian poet. The introduction discusses how and why she has come to be excluded from Victorian, Georgian and Modernist canons and argues that, while she is obviously a transitional poet, her themes and concerns, as well as her sensibility are Victorian. Tracing a tradition of nineteenth century women poets back to L. E. L. and Felicia Hemans, Chapter One locates Mew within this tradition by establishing links with her female precursors, in both themes and style. In particular, it considers her ambivalent attitude to home and the values connected with it and her use of characters who are outsiders to society. Mews poetry is largely concerned with the experience of women but she is also linked to Victorian male poets who share her sense of alienation. Chapter Two investigates to what extent her poetry can be said to be self expression, arguing that biographical detail is a necessary part of the context of the poetry but not reading the poetry as autobiography. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis and lesbian criticism, it shows how Mews secret concerns about sexuality and madness emerge in techniques of displacement, such as the use of personae. Chapter Three discusses how Mews use of double forms, especially the dramatic monologue, reveal a secret self that is divided or fragmented. A close reading of Madeleine in Church, probably her best dramatic monologue, reveals how the conflicts caused by sexuality and religious doubt are reflected in the imagery and language of the poem, and in the variations in metre and stanza form. Mews use of an ungendered speaking subject in some poems is also discussed as a rejection of the dichotomy between genders in the pursuit of an austere aesthetic of detachment. The concluding chapter considers the claims made for Mew as a Modernist poet and establishes similarities between Mew and Laforgue who influenced Pound and Eliot. However, the Modernist elements of Mews work and her concern with the fragmentation of consciousness and experimentation with form and metre, are shown to be thematic and stylistic developments already established in the Victorian period in the work of poets such as Browning and Emily Dickinson. Mew was connected with the avant-garde of the early twentieth century through The Yellow Book and her association with May Sinclair, but she was never able to break free of her nineteenth century preoccupation with sexuality and remained tied imaginatively to the Victorian period. Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction : Charlotte Mew, said to be a writer. 1 Chapter 1 The Homeless Ghost 9 Chapter 2 The Secret Self 28 Chapter 3 The Divided Self 48 Chapter 4 The Changeling 65 Appendix 83 Bibliography 84 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my tutor, Dr. David Jones for his constant support, warm encouragement and useful advice throughout the A819 course and particularly during the writing of this dissertation. I would also like to thank the members of the Manchester tutorial group for their friendship and support over the last two years. Thanks are also due to Manchester Central Library for granting me free reading and borrowing rights, although I am not a resident of Manchester, and to Hilary Attfield of Victorian Poetry for locating a back number of the journal for me during the chaos of moving all stock to another building. I would also like to thank my husband for priority access to the computer, for help with technical snags and for his conscientious proof reading. INTRODUCTION Charlotte Mew, said to be a writer.* *From a newspaper report of Mews death, in Louis Untermeyer, Lives of the Poets (London : W. H. Allen, 1960), pp.655-657. Thomas Hardy described Charlotte Mew as far and away the best living woman poet who will be read when others are forgotten and during her lifetime her poetry was critically acclaimed. Contemporary reviews show an appreciation of her confident handling of metrical forms and the originality of her poetic voice. A reviewer of her first collection, The Farmers Bride, 1916, praised the poetry because no touch of the amateur remains and the second edition of 1921 brought praise from Edith Sitwell for Mews infallible certainty for the right expression.  While Edgell Rickword felt that the poems were not always successful he acknowledged that there was the pulse of an original mind behind them. In a review of the American edition of The Farmers Bride (renamed Saturday Market, 1921) Marion Strobel thought Mew was sometimes in danger of becoming melodramatic and verbose but she also described the book as the work of a mature artist. Mew also received the accolade of a parody in Punch while the Southport Guardian described her as one of the best of contemporary women poets, individual in style and in outlook, skilled in metrical forms, and fresh in expression. Yet, for more than fifty years after her death in 1928, Mews poetry was little known because she had been displaced from literary tradition. I believe this displacement stems from the poor representation of Mews work in anthologies plus the fact that there was no serious study of her poetry until Mary Davidows thesis in 1960. She has usually been excluded from Victorian anthologies on historical grounds because none of her poetry was published until 1901 although she was writing poetry from childhood. She was also rejected by Edward Marsh for any of the five volumes of Georgian Poetry (1912-1922) because of her highly individual poetic voice and experimentation with form. These aspects of her work have recently been seen as modernist although ignored by modernist poets at the time, with the exception of Ezra Pound who published The Fte in The Egoist in 1914. Harold Monro, whose repeated efforts to get her work accepted by Edward Marsh were in vain, included five of her poems in his anthology, Twentieth Century Poetry, and Louis Untermeyer included fifteen in his Modern American and British Poetry. Interest in her work revived again with the publication of Collected Poems by G. Duckworth in 1953. John Holmes, who reviewed the book, insisted that even without this new collection Mew would not have been forgotten because there is such a timeless essence, a strange, simple, passionate power in her poems, that even a few would have persisted. This may be true but the few that persisted into the anthologies of the seventies and eighties are mainly the shorter poems and so do not give a true picture of Mews poetic range. Only five of Mews shorter poems are included in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, ed. Philip Larkin (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1973) but, as Larkin says, an anthology covering more than seventy years of poetry can only hope to achieve wide rather than deep representation (p.vi). It is disappointing then that the more recent and more specialised volume, Twentieth Century Womens Poetry ed. Fleur Adcock (London : Faber and Faber, 1987), contains only three of Mews poems.  However, one of these, In Nunhead Cemetery, is a good example of Mews longer poems, using a dramatic monologue with a male persona to present a psychological study of the descent into madness caused by bereavement. Mews poetry is given much better representation in the 1995 anthology, Victorian Women Poets, edited by Margaret Leighton and Angela Reynolds. Included are The Farmers Bride, a powerful expression of repressed desire, Fame, (Mews favourite poem), which expresses feelings of dislocation and creative sterility through the image of a stillbirth, and Madeleine in Church, one of her most experimental poems in its use of widely varying line lengths and stream of consciousness technique. Her inclusion in this anthology is the natural consequence of the strong case Leighton makes for Mew as a Victorian poet in Victorian Women Poets : Writing Against The Heart (London : Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), placing her with Christina Rossetti as foremost in any evaluation of the period (p.2). Leighton argues that Victorian poetry is a cultural movement extending beyond the turn of the century rather than an historically delimited period and that Mews imaginative loyalties are clearly Victorian in this sense. They emerge in her use of the old motifs of desire, guilt, death, prostitution and sainthood but it is her highly individualistic reworking of them, and her development of the dramatic monologue in particular, that make her one of the great original voices in poetry. I find this argument convincing and in Chapter One I aim to show that the significance and originality of Mews work emerges most clearly when seen in the context of the Victorian poetic tradition which shaped it and that the sense of displacement and alienation which, in my opinion, characterises her poetry, has its roots in this tradition. In her ambivalent attitude towards home, her rejection of traditional feminine roles and her search for a motherland, she echoes many female precursors but is also linked to Victorian male poets who felt displaced from contemporary society too. A desire to break free of the restrictions she felt, both as a woman and a poet, is expressed through the recurring images of the road and the stair and her sense of displacement is embodied in the proliferation of characters in her poems who are for various reasons outsiders to society. Mews poetic output was small. Only sixty-eight poems have been published and although she spoke of stacks of MSS. salted away in trunks, very little was found after her death. Mew blamed domestic difficulties (the running of a household and the demands of an invalid mother) for her small output of poetry but Alida Monro suggests that it was also due to a certain dilettante outlook and a feeling of not being taken seriously. I believe another contributing factor was Mews displacement of her creative energies from poetry into the writing of short stories, for which there was a ready market in contemporary journals, and I think this can be linked to a sense of displacement as a lesbian in a heterosexual society.  In Chloe plus Olivia, Lillian Faderman argues that lesbian writers feared being stigmatised by society and responded to this anxiety with a form of self-censorship, choosing simply not to write, or at least not to publish. Another response was to use a method of encoding which would allow them, as Emily Dickinson wrote, to tell all the truth/ but tell it slant. Lesbianism was never illegal but it was considered to be a perversion and, despite the proliferation of studies of sexuality at the turn of the century, there was no real openness about it. Faderman suggests that the definition of lesbian women as a type offered reassurance as it made them aware that they were not alone. For Mew, however, with a family background of mental illness, the association of homosexuality with the hereditary trait of insanity was likely to have been a source of anxiety and guilt. Mew certainly was never open about her sexuality and her lesbianism was not confirmed until 1982 by Marjorie Watts, daughter of Mews friend Mrs. Dawson Scott who, after hearing about sexual advances made by Mew to May Sinclair, wrote in her journal for July 1914, Charlotte is evidently a pervert. Faderman argues that such biographical information is crucial to deciphering lesbian texts, throwing light on areas which may otherwise be inexplicable I think it is useful as part of the context of the poetry but am wary of reading poems as autobiography . As Angela Leighton says, the self who lives is not the same as the self who writes although this does not mean that the first is simply irrelevant and dead. While the main concern of Mews poetry is the experience of women, it does not follow that the poems are autobiographical. In Chapter Two, I argue that the self who speaks in Mews poems is always a creation of the imagination, whether it is adopting the role of the suffering singer as in Song, Oh! Sorrow, Sorrow, or addressing the traditional theme of child death in To a Child in Death, or voicing a frank expression of female sexuality in Madeleine in Church. Mews life is displaced into art when she transposes details of her own experience in poems such as In Nunhead Cemetery and in The Quiet House, which she described as the most subjective of the lot. However, an approach to her poetry based on Freudian theories of displacement and Lesbian encoding reveals secret concerns about sexuality and madness which in Mews mind are linked together. Mews use of personae is another form of displacement. In Madeleine in Church, she uses a female persona to express a womans sensuousness but in The Farmers Bride, erotic desire for the female body is displaced into a male persona. This suggests a rejection of the dichotomy between masculine and feminine attributes and also a fragmentation of the self. Faderman argues that the prevalence of male personae may also indicate a conception of the self as inverted, possessing a male soul. I think this may be too simplistic as it ignores a continuing tradition of impersonation of the opposite sex by both male and female writers in an interrogation of the terms masculine and feminine. In Chapter Three I discuss how Mews use of personae illustrates divisions within herself, especially in her religious belief. I argue that this divided or fragmented self is reflected in the forms of her poetry, especially the dramatic monologue, and support this with detailed examples of division in imagery and metre in her most powerful and innovative use of this form, Madeleine in Church. Chapter Four draws this study to a conclusion with an assessment of Mews individuality as a poet and to what extent she can be considered as a contributor to Modernism. My own view is that although her poetry expresses the fragmentation of the self and experiments with free verse and stream of consciousness techniques, which are seen as traits of Modernism, these elements can also be found in the work of Victorian poets. Her poetry was shaped by Victorian patterns of desire and guilt and although she was involved in the world of the early twentieth century, she remained untouched by its emancipation. The ambiguous complexities created by conflicts of sexuality and religious belief enrich her work, and together with her confident handling of metre and experiments with form, justify the title of her obituary by S. C. Cockerell, Miss Charlotte Mew : A Poet of Rare Quality. CHAPTER ONE The Homeless Ghost where suddenly the light Of Youth went out, and I, no longer I, Climbed home, the homeless ghost I was to be. (Pri en Mer, The Englishwoman, xx, 59, November 1913) Charlotte Mew did not include Pri en Mer in The Farmers Bride (1916) nor did it appear in The Rambling Sailor (1929) or Collected Poems (1953), but the homeless ghost of this poem, a personification of alienation and displacement, haunts her work in a variety of guises. Many of her characters are not at home in society. Some are outcasts such as fallen women and the insane. Others find themselves at odds with social conventions in other ways, such as the young wife in The Farmers Bride and the farm labourer in Arracombe Wood, who are more in tune with animals and the natural world than with human society. The sense of homelessness which colours Mews work is a characteristic of Victorian poetry and stems from the fact that for many poets home was a problematical concept. Ideally a secure retreat from a hostile world, it is more often the source and object of deep insecurity and anxiety where they feel out of place. As the focus of Victorian values with the emphasis on moral duty and self-denial, this place of asylum becomes a prison for the poetic imagination. This was felt by male and female poets. In Tennysons Ulysses, for example, the values of hearth and home, the constraints of slow prudence and responsibility, are weighed against those of Romantic freedom and found to be lacking. For a male poet who must be always roaming with a hungry heart, homelessness seems like a natural state and is not at odds with other masculine pioneering attributes. For women poets, however, the rejection of home has serious psychological implications since the segregation of masculine and feminine spheres had made home, the details of domestic life, and the cluster of values connected with it, the special province of women. For them, homelessness is an unnatural state and to not be at home is to be displaced from a position of security, to lose a defined role in society. As poets, women were consigned to the sphere of the lyric tradition, to the creation of all that is beautiful in form, delicate in sentiment, graceful in action and not considered able to portray with the vivid power of Homeric song or to dive into the deep recesses of the human heart. The tradition of the poetess gave women a secure place in poetic discourse but was, nevertheless, as Isobel Armstrong points out, a restrictive practice. Yet, as Armstrong shows, only some women poets protested openly against the limitations of their allotted social and literary spheres. In Aurora Leigh (1856), Elizabeth Barrett Brownings speaker rejects mere womans work and a cage-bird life in an epic, masculine form.  Christina Rossetti, complaining of the weariness of a womans lot in From the Antique(1854), declares I wish and I wish I were a man . Like Barrett Browning, she reverses the more usual form of the sonnet, making woman the subject rather than the object, which may have influenced Mews own experimentation with the sonnet form and the use of male and female personae. In Dramatic Studies (1866) and Portraits (1870), Augusta Webster uses the dramatic monologue, popularised by Browning in the 1850s, to show that the subjectivity of women is socially determined. In A Castaway, she investigates the economic reasons for prostitution, rejecting the opposition between the pure state of the budding colourless rose of home and the fallen one of the prostitute whose reflection in the mirror is No fiend, no slimy thing out of the pools, but a woman sure. Her rejection of guilt (And I accept myself) is echoed in Mews dramatic monologue of the fallen woman, Madeleine in Church, in the words, We are what we are. In 1881, in another dramatic monologue, Xantippe, Amy Levy is still protesting against having to learn the lesson of dumb patience and the restrictions of The narrow life within the narrow walls but much Victorian womens poetry, (including many of Christina Rossettis poems) seems to accept the limitations of a feminine aesthetic while subverting it from within.  An inability to identify with their allotted place and a need to break free of the restraints imposed upon their imaginations often emerges in ambiguous attitudes towards house and home and finds expression in the theme of homelessness. Charlotte Mews homeless ghost has many female precursors in a subversive tradition which Angela Leighton and Isobel Armstrong trace back to Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon. Although Hemans was extolled by Stodart for her portrayal of the kindly charities of home, in some poems she pushes at the boundaries of the domesticity she apparently upholds through depictions of restlessness and estrangement. In The Chamois Hunters Love the speaker is willing to leave the blessed home and the joyous hearth and in The Strangers Heart she describes the yearning anguish of the stranger who can find no rest. Landons suffering singer, Eulalie, in A History of the Lyre, is an orphan who describes herself as Wayfarer in this bleak and bitter world who, as stranger to domestic bliss, is looking to the grave as to a home. She apparently endorses the view that womans smile Should only make the loveliness of home but there is little regret and some pride in the admission that her poetry has made her heart too like a temple for a home. Adelaide Anne Procters poem Homeless expresses a passionate belief that everyone has a right to a home , but she questions the roles that women are forced to play. In A Legend of Provence (a re-working of an old legend for The Haunted House, the 1859 Christmas edition of Dickens All The Year Round ) she shows the psychological damage that can be caused by the fragmentation of female subjectivity. A domestic setting frames the poem but the speaker by the hearth is Half weary with a listless discontent. The orphaned Angela of her story who leaves the convent and becomes a fallen woman is forced to play an outcasts part and, although she is allowed to return, no real integration of her two selves is possible. Her sense of displacement remains as a shadow which can only be removed by death. In Philip and Mildred, home, the end, the haven, is shown to be an empty prize for the unquestioning, submitting Mildred who has been left behind, both physically and intellectually, by Philip. The poem implies that womans longing for home cannot be fully satisfied by the social and literary spheres to which she is confined. Again, death is presented as an escape from suffering but the certainty of the statement Peace at last at the beginning of the final verse is undermined by the questioning that follows. In Mews poetry the yearning for home is seldom directed towards houses. Like Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson she usually associates them with feelings of being shut in or shut out. In Rossettis At Home, the returning ghost is able to pass the door and enter the much frequented house but finds herself apparently forgotten, excluded from her friends thoughts and lives.  In Shut Out, the speaker finds the door closed against her. She describes her outcast state, being shut out by iron bars, not from the house but from the garden which she claims as her particular province. Her exclusion is completed by mortar and stone when a spirit, significantly gendered male, builds a wall with no loophole great or small. In Emily Dickinsons poems, I years had been from home and A door just opened on a street, the yearning for home is fixed on a house but the speakers are unable to enter. In both poems the focus of exclusion is the closed door. The first speaker wishes to return home but is unable to open the door and cross the threshold because she fears that, unlike Procters Angela, there will no longer be a place for her there. Like Amy Levys speaker in The Old House, who cannot face the ghost of her younger self, she runs away and her displacement is complete when she leaves feeling like a thief. The speaker in the second poem is lost and passing by, not expecting to be taken in, but is made still more wretched by a glimpse through an open door which is quickly shut against her. In many of Mews poems the speakers are physically, as well as figuratively, outsiders. In The Sunlit House, a stranger feels drawn to the shuttered and neglected house but remains outside, pacing up the weed-grown paths and down, waiting until From an upper window a bird flew out, a symbol of escape which seems to set the speaker free to move on. In Pcheresse, the outcast status of the fallen woman is emphasized by the fact that she is outside the house that looms white above her while the light comes from some high window beyond her reach. The speaker also remains outside the home in On the Asylum Road, one of two poems by Mew concerned with the treatment of madness. All we see of the madhouse are the unwelcoming windows of stained or clouded glass, which resemble the blinkered eyes of the merry town or village folk with their Victorian view of madness as the wages of mans sin. Although the poem does not openly reject this point of view or the practice of incarceration, the speaker seeks to identify with the asylum inhabitants as brother-shadows and the ambiguity of the title suggests that anyone may end up as an inmate of the asylum. In Ken, Mew makes a closer study of one person, Ken, the madman of the title. He is both shut out and shut in. When he is expelled from his own home, the gabled house facing the Castle wall, because his previously harmless, if eccentric, behaviour becomes too much of a nuisance to the neighbours, he is imprisoned in the red brick barn upon the hill, the asylum. This is prefigured by the description of his strange way of walking with arms thrust out as if to beat/ Always against a threat of bars. Throughout the poem Ken is identified with the outdoors, with plants and with animals. It is when he is indoors, especially in church, that he seems out of place, restless, and given to evil fits. In the poem, In Nunhead Cemetery, the process of mental breakdown is revealed in a dramatic monologue, but Kens madness is filtered through a speaker who pities poor Ken but still finds him alien, with hardly a trace/ Of likeness to a human face and he is kept at a distance. The speaker feels a guilty share in his committal to the asylum but what it is actually like inside is left to the imagination. When Mew does take us inside a house she creates an atmosphere of confinement rather than one of security. In Rooms and Exspecto Resurrectionem, rooms are associated with death and recall the enclosed domestic interiors of Emily Dickinsons poetry. In Exspecto Resurrectionem, which looks forward to an afterlife, the oppressiveness of the dark room, the grave where the dead are finally shut in, is countered by the belief that it will be opened by Christ who has the key. The tone is not as light as Dickinsons poem, The grave my little cottage is, where the marble tea is laid in the orderly parlour, but both poets seem to be trying to make death less terrifying by domesticating it. Rooms is more sombre in its description of a dying relationship, the steady slowing down of the heart. Mew uses the spatial restrictions of domestic interiors as images of both physical and emotional confinement and of spiritual repression. These are not just the places where things died but are somehow implicated in the deaths, especially the death of love. In Mews poem which centres on domestic life, The Quiet House, the title does not denote peaceful seclusion but sterility and death because nothing lives here but the fire. There is a resemblance to Amy Levys The Old House with its silent stair and brooding shadows. The female speaker, bereaved and lonely, is imprisoned in the house through her sense of duty to Poor Father who scarcely lets me slip out of his sight. The variety of stanza length and rhythm follows the changes in the speakers thoughts and moods. The first stanza points the contrast between the noisy house of her youth and the quiet house of the present. In the second, it is clear that she does not feel at home in this domestic sphere where she is reduced again to the powerlessness of childhood by both her father and even her cousins friend. His authoritarian, almost bullying attitude towards her is emphasized by the repeated use of the masculine pronoun at the beginning of the last four lines. The poem then moves deeper into the speakers mind in a section which seems to deal with sexual desire and guilt, a deadly sweet pain, expressed through images of burning and the colours red, crimson and scarlet. In the next section, where the speaker focuses on her surroundings again, it seems that the house itself saps her vitality. The monotony and tedium of her life where Day follows day/ The same, or now and then, a different grey, is expressed in the image of unchanging rooms, just as they were, apart from the dead mothers room which is now always shut. There are echoes here of Tennysons Mariana, waiting for someone to release her, but at the end of the poem the mood of the speaker changes from passive to active. She realises that the only person who can effect an escape is herself, not the unsatisfactory and dimly remembered cousins friend : I think it is myself I go to meet. The cry of the last line (I do not care ; some day I shall not think; I shall not be !) seems to echo the views of Procters protagonists that death is the only certain escape from suffering, but the defiant tone suggests that it could also express a desire for the death of a self that is limited by social and literary constructs of femininity and a determination to set the poetic imagination free. A more positive image of a house appears in There shall be no night there, a poem unpublished in Mews lifetime. In the first stanza, the far off glimmer of the little town seems welcoming as does that chamber in the lamp-lit street,/ Where waits the pillow of thy breast and thee. However, the Biblical quotation of the title, from Revelation 21: 9-27, refers to the reconstructed Jerusalem, which will only come about at some future unspecified date. This implies that the poems vision of home exists only in the poets imagination and may be an unobtainable ideal. The indispensable element in the Victorian concept of home is the presence of the devoted, self-sacrificing mother, but in the domestic interiors of Mews poems mothers are as significantly absent as they are in many poems by her female predecessors. Barrett Brownings Aurora Leigh feels a mother-want about the world (line 40) because, like Landons Eulalie, Procters Angela, and Mews speaker in The Quiet House, she is an orphan. The lack of a mother figure as role model forces these women to define their own roles and this leads to an interrogation of the system of separate spheres. In Madeleine in Church the dead mother of the speaker now reduced to a ghost was also diminished in life from a happy girl with the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half sweet, to a mask, shrunk and small / Sapless and lined like a dead leaf. This is attributed to the effects of time and grief but more specifically to the fact that she was yoked to the man that Father was. Mothers are also absent from poems with a male protagonist but not only because they are dead. The absence of any reference to the young boys mother in Hemans Casabianca, shows an awareness that she is considered irrelevant in the mans world of the poem just as the absent Penelope (referred to only as an aged wife) is shown to be irrelevant to both husband and son in Tennysons Ulysses.  In Mews poem, The Fte, the mother of the adolescent speaker is alive but too far away, physically and psychologically, to be of help to him. His sexual awakening changes his attitude towards her. She becomes diminished, his little mother, and her much repeated aphorism, Nothing is true that is not good, seems trite. Mews depiction of marriage and domesticity as disabling and destructive imply that a woman must look outside the domestic sphere for a place where she can feel at home. The search for a motherland is a common theme of Victorian womens poetry. For Hemans it is a foreign, exotic place, a matriarchal country that existed in some dimly remembered past. For L.E.L. and Elizabeth Barrett Browning it is embodied in an image of Italy as an impassioned land which can provide the emotional space they crave. Christina Rossettis Mother Country also draws on an exotic version of Italy with Its spices and cedars / Its gold and ivory but it is seen as unattainable, at least in this world. For Mew, France seems to have provided a liberating landscape. In a letter from Brittany she describes feeling a sense of space and desolation, very grand and mysterious at night. A number of her poems draw upon her experiences there, such as Le Sacr-Coeur (1916), Pcheresse (1916), The Little Portress (1929) and Pri en Mer, but imaginatively, she seems to be most at home in the natural world. A polarisation in Mews poetry between the city and the countryside is present even in an early poem, Afternoon Tea, where the speaker would rather have tea with the birds than with the good five-oclock people of the town. The tone of this poem is quite light-hearted, trivialising the concerns of city people as irrelevant to the greater natural world, but in other poems cities and houses are shown to be the enemies of nature and hence of the imagination too. For the speaker of In Nunhead Cemetery(1916), The houses in the streets are much too high and prevent him from seeing the sky. In Domus caedet Arborem (The house cuts down the tree), they become menacing. The cutting down of the plane trees, presumably to make way for more houses, is described as murder and the city has a look of a Spirit brooding crime while the houses seem to be simply biding their time. A longer poem, The Trees are Down, describes the felling of these trees at greater length and calls to mind Binsey Poplars by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Both poems decry and lament mans destruction of part of the natural world but while the tone of Hopkins poem is gently elegiac, Mews is highly dramatic. He condenses the experience while Mew re-enacts it.  She engages the reader in the actual moment of destruction through the use of the present tense. The speaker seems to address us directly in the language and rhythm of everyday speech which often leads to long, overrun lines. We see the last bough falling (Down now! -) and hear the sounds involved in the felling : For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall, The crash of trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves, With the Whoops and the whoas, the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all. Binsey Poplars, where the trees are already down, does not have this immediacy and although Hopkins mourns the Hack and rack of the Sweet especial rural scene he gives few details of it. He describes the trees affectionately as My aspens dear and laments the loss of their beauty that after-comers cannot guess but for Mews speaker the plane trees have been an integral part of her lifes experience. Through their passing Spring is unmade and she sees the loss of her youth. But the trees are more than a symbol for her. She actually identifies with them, declaring my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes. In a letter to Harold Monro, Mew describes her everlasting devotion to trees in connection with reading Monros own poem Trees which includes the lines : But it is different, different for me, (Also for you I fear) To whom a tree seems something more than a tree.  In Afternoon Tea, the speaker also identifies with trees, declaring my hearts in the wood, and other poems by Mew suggest that, like Michael Field, she associates trees with an ancient, pagan law of pleasure, an escape for the imagination from the duties and constraints of the womans sphere. As Angela Leighton points out, Mews description of the soul, singing among the trees in The Forest Road, bears a strong resemblance to Fields picture of the soul which perchest on the summer trees in The Mummy Invokes his Soul. Also, the old rooks talking loud overhead in the elms of Afternoon Tea recall the rooks in Fields Nests in Elms, cawing up and down the trees. In The Trees are Down however, there is a Christian element which is absent from the poems by Field. Mews speaker sees the felling of the trees as a deliberate act of destruction, unlike Hopkins who suggests that it is done out of ignorance (O if we but knew what we do). Dislike and blame are implied in the contrast between the loud common voices of the workmen and the whispering loveliness of the trees, and the last two lines, a dramatization of the quote from Revelation at the head of the poem, declare the felling to be a sin against Gods law, as well as a crime against Nature.  Although there are echoes of Michael Fields poetry in Mews work, emotionally she has more in common with the nature poet she so much admired, Emily Bront. In Saturday Market, precedence is given to some deep green hollow (a phrase redolent of Bronts lone green dell) over a kind old tree as a place of refuge. An essay by Mew, The Poems of Emily Bront, was published in Temple Bar in 1904 and she hoped that it would be used as an introduction to an edition of the poems edited by herself, but nothing came of it as there were already two other editions of Bronts poems in the pipeline. In it she describes Bront as perhaps one of natures outcasts who worshipped nature with all the intense and concentrated passion of her soul. In A little while, a little while, although the speaker states that there is nothing So longed for as the hearth of home, what she loves best is out of doors : The mute bird sitting on the stone, The dank moss dripping from the wall, The garden-walk with weeds oergrown. In the lonely speaker of this poem with her harassed heart one can recognize the ancestor of many of Mews female personae. In My Heart is Lame, for example, where the speaker wishes to walk slowly home, the emphasis is on the journey down the quiet evening roads under the quiet skies rather than the house which we never get to see. In Moorland Night, Mew seems to come closer to Bronts vision in her location of home in the grass and the sweet earth and in its final picture of a lonely wanderer, walking on the moor who starves for love. For Bront, both heaven and motherland are to be found in mother earth. As Stevie Davies points out in her essay, The Mother Planet, earth is one of the most recurrent words in Bronts poetry, often appearing in the first or last line of a poem as origin or destination. In Mews poetry too heaven is seen as an earthly paradise. In Not for that City, Bronts longing for A little and lone green lane is echoed in Mews rejection of the golden streets and glittering gates of the city of heaven for some remote and quiet stair. The question of In the Fields, Can I believe there is a heavenlier world than this?, invites the answer that none would ask a Heaven / More Like the Earth than thine from Bronts Shall Earth no more inspire thee? If there is no place like home to be found in domesticity, homelessness becomes ambivalent, a state of loss and estrangement perhaps but also a condition of freedom. Mew shows the apparently negative state of the outsider to be a positively charged force for change through dynamic images of the road. Several poems have road as part of their title, (The Forest Road, On the Road to the Sea, The Road to Kerity) and many of Mews characters are on the move. In The Rambling Sailor, an incarnation of Coleridges Ancient Mariner, whose rambling dialect reproduces his restless journeying around the world in an attempt to escape death, urges his listener to experience as much of life as he can. The pedlar in the poem of that name who walks the road, beyond mens bolted doors possesses a little Key of Dreams which he offers in exchange for the key / That locks your heavy heart. He is homeless but can see himself as a gay ghost and seems happy to accept the paradox expressed by Emily Dickinsons speaker in I meant to find her when I came : To wander now is my abode. In The Forest Road, the road is infinite, and stretching / World without end, a future full of endless possibilities, but the price of freedom is the loss of love. The decision to continue despite this shows the same determination as the words of Bronts speaker in Stanzas, who insists Ill walk where my own nature would be leading. The road is also likened to a stair, a calling stair, an image that suggests progress towards better things like Tennysons stepping-stones in In Memoriam. Mew, however, chooses to represent the road, which is out-of doors and so associated with public life, through an interior, domestic image. A stair enables downward as well as upward movement and one is reminded of Mrs. Sparsits staircase in Hard Times with its dark pit of ruin and shame at the bottom. In The Farmers Bride, the image seems to work paradoxically. There is a chance of happiness if the alienated wife should come down to her frustrated husband but the possibility of the total destruction of their marriage, and possibly her sanity too, if he goes up and forces himself on her. Mew also uses the image of the stair to express frustrated desire in Fame. The speakers wish to escape from others is thwarted by the people who are always on my stair and in Left Behind her escape is blocked because she cannot find the stair. Alienation and escape figure in The Changeling where the fairy child can be seen to represent the woman poet who cannot conform to rules which go against her nature. Although the child is fond of her human family, her own old home is the deep green hollow and she is generally out of step in human surroundings. The poem is built on a series of contrasts. In the third stanza, the child is drawn away from the stillness of the nursery by the wild dancing of the fairies, but in the following stanza the childs desire to be quiet so she can hear the whole world whispering is thwarted by the nursery riot. The piling up of natural sounds in this stanza, of Everything there is to hear / In the hidden heart of things, is similar to Rossettis piling up of descriptions of fruit in Goblin Market and creates the same effect of overflowing sensation. In the final stanza there is a strong contrast again between the childs view of the house from outside, The gold lamps glow, and the red fires gleam, and the Black and chill nights of the fairies. In the last few lines, longevity and freedom from pain (immortality and creative objectivity), offered as compensations for perpetual coldness (loss of love), lead to the emphatic but ambiguous cry :I shall never come back again! This may be an expression of regret but it could also be a celebration of her escape. In The Call Mew uses images of a cold and hostile world to represent the dangers involved in a poetic vocation. The first six lines set an uncharacteristically cosy domestic scene in just one sentence and create a sense of inertia. The characters do little but look and the vocabulary reflects the restrictions of their passive life on a low seat before a burned-out fire. The mood changes with the next four short lines, each of the first three containing a sound, (a call, a rattle, a voice), while the last introduces movement in the breath stirring our hair. In the next four lines which describe a visitation from a spirit, a stronger sense of movement is created with the words swift and Swept and the two questions of the third line disrupt the rhythm. The next section containing even more dynamic verbs, (snapped, unbarred, flung), ends with the people deciding that they too must take action. The bright or dark angel, which resembles the Holy Ghost is certainly not the angel of the house and there can be no turning back, whatever the risk, once the call to explore beyond the boundaries of home has been answered. It is not so much a matter of choice as one of compulsion : We must arise and go, But we must go. Like Bronts speaker in O! thy bright eyes must answer now, they realise that they must shun The common paths that others run for a strange road. In both poems, the compulsion to develop individual creativity is as strong as that which drives Tennysons Ulysses To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. CHAPTER TWO The Secret Self * I see myself among the crowd, Where no one fits the singer to his song, (Fame, The Farmers Bride, 1916) Mansfields comment about the secret self was written in the year that the second edition of The Farmers Bride, containing eleven new poems, was published in London by The Poetry Bookshop and in New York by Macmillan as Saturday Market. The concept of a secret self was not new. In 1833, J. S. Mill wrote that poetry was the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotions and in 1860 Dora Greenwell described womens writing as containing an Open Secret, free to all who could find its key the secret of a womans heart, with all its needs, its struggles, and its aspirations. This concept of the secret self seems to imply a liberal humanist view of the individual with an inner, essential being that can be expressed. Yet it could also be seen in poststructuralist terms as just one aspect of a subject that is divided or fragmented. I believe that both views can be useful in the interpretation and appreciation of Mews poetry, where a highly individual tone emerges through the use of many voices. In this chapter, I want to investigate her displacement of secret concerns about hereditary madness and sexuality which are seen not only as a threat to her integrity as an individual but also as an obstacle to poetic creativity. In contemporary reviews of the nineteen twenty-one edition of The Farmers Bride opinion is divided about how subjective or objective Mews poetry is. Edgell Rickword states that Mew has a very definite personality. By contrast, in a review of Saturday Market, Marion Strobel writes, Almost all the poems are objective and that Mew successfully subordinates her own personality to that of the characters in her poems. Objectivity seems to be used here in the Jungian sense of impersonality. In Psychology and Literature (1930) published two years after Mews death, Jung makes several observations which seem relevant to Mews poetry. He argues that the act of creation contains a secret and is the result of a kind of innate drive and that a great work of art is like a dream. He also describes the artist as objective and impersonal even inhuman and Mew said something very similar in 1914. I wonder if Art, as they say, is rather an inhuman thing ? Apart from such remarks in letters, the only other source of what Mew thought about poetry is her essay on Emily Bront. Most of the characteristics she praises in Bronts poetry seem to be what she aimed for in her own. A belief in an essential self informs her comments that Bronts poetry reveals a veritable self(p.356). Mew admires her mastery of her creativity and the poems are described as wonderful, awful dreams, with their simple but compelling passion, their self-reliance and restraint, their concentrated force and purity (p.357). They are seen as expressions of Bronts spiritual and mysterious self which is hardly human in its self-sufficiency and aloofness and finds expression in a passion untouched by mortality and unappropriated by sex (p.358). As Mews poetry is often concerned with the experience of women there is a temptation to try to fit the singer to the song by reading her work as autobiography, although this would not necessarily reveal the secret self, as autobiographies are created from a selection of experience. However, Mew herself precludes such a reading as she never simply transcribes details of her own life into her poems, but rather displaces these experiences into another context. Even in the poem which she describes as the most subjective of the lot, The Quiet House, where the oppressive atmosphere seems to reflect what is known of Mews home background, there are significant differences from real life. It was Mews father, not mother, who died and the madness that removed a brother and sister from the Mew household is replaced by a different form of social disgrace. The madness which Mew believed to be hereditary was never openly discussed within the family and her own experience and fear of it are displaced into the poems, Ken, On the Asylum Road and In Nunhead Cemetery. These displacements of life into art which seem to serve as defence mechanisms invite a Freudian interpretation of the poetry. Mew and Freud were contemporaries and psychoanalysis, which was being developed from the 1880s, forms part of the cultural background of Mews poetry, although, as Elaine Showalter points out in The Female Malady, his work was not taken seriously in England until the First World War. To some extent Freuds analysis of how the mind works can be seen to support the idea of a fixed identity because the three parts of the mind he describes as the id, the ego, and the superego, seem to function in the same way as the Christian trinity, where Father, Son and Holy Ghost are different manifestations of only One God. In his account of the unconscious, displacement is a device for repressing impulses or memories which cause anxiety to the ego and so threaten the individuals sense of identity. These anxieties are diverted into a disguised outlet. Applied to Mews poetry this model explains the omissions and changes in biographical details in The Quiet House and the distance that is kept between the speaker and the lunatic in Ken and On the Asylum Road. Only in In Nunhead Cemetery does Mew attempt to get inside an insane mind but to do so she uses another form of displacement, creating a male persona as speaker of the poem. Mews brother, Henry, was buried in Nunhead Cemetery. He had been confined in Peckham Hospital for many years after a diagnosis of dementia praecox. In the poem, however, the male speakers descent into madness is triggered by the death of his fiance. The last eight stanzas, which describe what Mew called the gradual lapse into insanity and which she wrote before the rest of the poem, were omitted from the 1953 edition of Mews poems by Duckworth with no explanation. This effectively destroys the impact of the poem, giving the impression that it is a tender expression of loss when, in fact, it is a study of the destabilizing effects of grief on the mourners sense of identity. The first of these eight stanzas, the longest of the poem, is a lyrical description of how the lovers spent their time together in happy anticipation of their marriage. But still it was a lovely thing Through the grey months to wait for Spring With the birds that go a-gypsying In the parks till the blue seas call. The next stanza moves forward to a lost future of sexual fulfilment. I would have called, you would have come to me And kissed me back. This leads to frustration and anger, expressed through passionate repetitions. Now I will burn you back, I will burn you through, and It would not be you, it would not be you! A calmer tone seems to be restored in the next stanza but the request he makes to the dead girl (Let me stay here too.) shows that the speakers grasp on reality is weakening. As the breakdown deepens, his mind reverts to childhood Christmases when he ironically went half mad with happiness and he regresses to the state of a child, addressing the dead woman as if she were his mother in short simple statements. I am scared, I am staying with you tonight Put me to sleep. The final stanza shows his total alienation from the real world, ending with the disturbing image of digging up all the graves again to restore the dead to life. There is no one left to speak to there; Here they are everywhere, And just above them fields and fields of roses lie If he would dig it all up again they would not die. In Mews exploration of a psychologically disturbed mind there are interesting echoes of dramatic monologues by Browning and Tennyson. Tennyson, like Mew, was haunted by the fear of going mad and in Maud his intention was to show the unfolding of a lonely, morbid soul, touched with inherited madness. Yet Brownings poem, Porphyrias Lover, comes closer to Mews poem in its association of death with sexual frustration and madness. However, there are significant differences between the poems. The madness of Brownings speaker results in the death of Porphyria while in Mews poem it is his fiances death that deranges the speaker. In death, Porphyrias lover feels that he possesses her more completely than he could in life, but in Mews poem death has put an end to hopes of sexual fulfilment and the speaker feels that he is to blame. And you went and I let you go! Porphyria is the object of the speakers gaze both alive and dead and while there is a detailed description of her physical appearance, she is as silent in life as in death. In Mews poem, there is no physical description of the dead woman but we know what she liked to do. Even though she is dead she plays an active role in the poem and the speaker has learnt to look at the world through her eyes. He is no longer, The cheap, stale chap I used to be Before I saw the things you made me see. Although Brownings poem relates a series of events leading up to the murder the overall effect of the poem is of stasis, conveyed by the final picture of Porphyria cradled in her murderers arms. This effect is created by the use of a very tightly controlled tetrameter, a regular rhyming scheme and the use of the past tense. The sixty lines are divided into sections of five lines by the regular rhyming pattern but the overall effect is of a continuous sequence. The sense of control this conveys plus the simplicity of the diction suggest the working of a rational mind, but the matter of fact description of the murder reveals the speakers psychosis. By contrast, Mews poem is full of movement. A sense of immediacy is created through the use of the present tense, while variety in stanza and line lengths and rhyming patterns express the speakers wandering train of thought and gradual disintegration into insanity. The first four stanzas, regular quatraines with alternate end rhymes, show a mind that is in control, or seeking to control, its grief, but by the sixth stanza the grip on reality has already weakened. Extended lines, and pauses within them, imitate the stops and starts of a one-sided conversation. This is not a real place ; perhaps by-and-by I shall wake I am getting drenched with all this rain : To-morrow I will tell you about the eyes of the Crystal Palace train Looking down on us and you will laugh and I shall see what you see again. The following stanzas vary in length and rhyming pattern but in the middle of the poem, the two stanzas describing how their wedding day would have been, return to the regularity of the quatraine. This expresses not only how often the speaker must have rehearsed this in his head but also an attempt to regain control of his mind. This regular stanza form is not used again in the poem. The secret that emerges from In Nunhead Cemetery is the fear that sexual passion and madness are inextricably linked and that both produce feelings which cannot be controlled and so threaten stability. As such, they are at odds with the Darwinian psychiatric view of mental health as the possession of a well-fashioned will where such impulses and emotions are constrained by inhibitory power.  They also work against Mews view of poetic creativity, not as the outpouring of feeling but as a controlled expression of it. It is significant that the speakers fiance has never kissed him back. His sexual passion is not reciprocated by his creative other half. Most patients diagnosed as insane between 1870 and 1910 were women and Mews sister, Freda, was confined to Whitelands Hospital, Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight for life, after showing symptoms similar to those of her brother, but Mew never tackles madness in a woman directly through a female speaker. For women, mental problems were often associated with sexuality and this connection emerges in Monsieur qui passe. We hear snatches of the twisted skein of the fallen womans speech but it is filtered through a male speaker who thinks she will end up in some walled house upon a hill but shows little sympathy. Pouah ! These women and their nerves !  Mew was never open about her own sexuality. No mention of her lesbian orientation is mentioned in Alida Monros memoir (1953) or in correspondence about her from family friends collected by Mary Davidow (1960). This may have been due to a desire to protect her reputation but it is possible that Mew managed to keep her lesbian feelings secret. Monro recounts her dread of scandal and during her lifetime coming out as a lesbian would certainly have led to social stigmatization.  In The History of Sexuality (1978), Michel Foucault argues that the Victorian period produced a wide dispersion of devices for speaking about sex but much of the discourse about it was concerned with defining what was normal and abnormal. The desire to silence sexuality produced a whole series of discourses on the species and sub-species of homosexuality which was to make possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of perversity. Psychopathia Sexualis (1892) by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sexual Inversion (1897) by Havelock Ellis defined homosexuality and lesbianism as abnormal and also associated them with a diseased family background.  Lillian Faderman argues that for some lesbians, sexology was helpful in forming their own sub-culture by making them aware that they existed as a type and that lesbianism was a permanent, fixed characteristic. However, she adds that for others, what the sexologists wrote must have been frightening or meaningless. While it is likely that the unorthodox, pagan Michael Field probably found it meaningless, for Mew, with her Christian sense of sin, it must have been a source of anxiety and in her poetry the expression of desire for the female body is always displaced into the persona of a male speaker. In Chloe plus Olivia (1994), Lillian Faderman argues that before the advent of sexology same-sex relationships between women were not frowned upon because they were seen as romantic friendships which did not involve sexual activity. Certainly, Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) wrote poetry which spoke openly of love between women without suffering social ostracism. Robert Browning referred to them as his two dear Greek women but as Angela Leighton points out the sexual nature of their relationship, only explicit in their unpublished journals, was either not known or, more significantly, not named by their contemporaries. Their earlier poetry is informed by a hedonistic paganism but, like Mew, they were keen to dissociate themselves from scandal connected with fin-de-sicle decadence. Field withdrew a poem from the issue of The Yellow Book (1894) in which Mews short story Passed appeared, not wishing to be associated with other depraved contributors such as Beardsley. In January 1895, Mews play The China Bowl was rejected by The Yellow Books editor, Henry Harland, and after the trial of Oscar Wilde in the following April, when the reviews offices were stoned, Mew never submitted anything else to him, although the review continued until 1897. While romantic friendships between women were tolerated throughout the Victorian period, the sexually active lesbian was regarded as evil, a kind of vampire preying on other women, but also an erotic figure. In Baudelaires Femmes Damnes there is an implicit criticism of societys view of lesbian women as demons or monsters, but the poets compassion is only expressed after he has given a voyeuristic account of their bleak sufferings and unquenchable thirsts. A similar image of erotic evil is created in S. T. Coleridges Christabel in the figure of Geraldine. Coleridges great-great niece , Mary Coleridge, was able to take on this demonized figure and transform it into another form of myth in The Witch. Like Mew, she made use of the figure of the wanderer in her poetry, publishing one volume under the pseudonym of Anados, meaning the wanderer or more literally on no road. As a poet with no fairy godmother but the daunting figure of Samuel Taylor as her fairy great-great-uncle, she felt herself to be condemned to wander restlessly around the gates of Fairyland. In The Witch the Geraldine figure is displaced from the medieval world of Christabel into a bleaker, timeless setting.  She is far less threatening and the erotic charge of Christabel is missing. She describes herself as not tall or strong but a little maiden still and her plea Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door, made with the voice that women have,/ Who plead for their hearts desire, is a plaintive one, reminiscent of the cry of Cathys ghost in Wuthering Heights. Her entry into the house effects a change but, unlike the lady in Christabel who produces A tongue of light, a fit of flame (l.159) from the ashes, this waif-like figure causes the fire to die in the hearth. The meaning of this stanza is not clear and there is a puzzling displacement of the subjective I from the witch to some other speaker, but it could be an expression of the view that emerges from Mews poetry, that the warmth of human attachments must be sacrificed for poetic creativity which at its core is dispassionate and cold. There certainly seems to be a family resemblance between Mary Coleridges witch and Charlotte Mews changeling, who will always be very cold. In Mews work poetic creativity is always associated with coldness and the colour white, indicating an absence of passion which is seen as a hindrance to the poet. In The Call and Do Dreams lie Deeper? these are combined in an image of snow. Although Mews lesbianism was never explicitly expressed in her poetry, lesbian critics have provided ways of decoding the lesbian content in her work. Catherine Stimpson describes two patterns of lesbian writing and, although she is writing about the novel, the categories seem to hold true for poetry as well. One is a narrative of damnation showing the lesbian to be a lonely outcast while the other is a narrative of enabling escape, where the lesbian rebels against social stigmatism. In Mews poetry; the first pattern emerges in the different manifestations of the homeless ghost. The second pattern is more characteristic of the poetry of Michael Field but Mews use of the repeated image of the road or the stair show that she was striving to escape. Lillian Faderman outlines a variety of other ways in which a lesbian sensibility may emerge in writing. One which seems particularly pertinent to Mews work is the gaze that falls lovingly on the female image and gives a blurred representation of the male image. In Madeleine in the Church, Madeleine is both the speaking subject and subject matter of the poem and the male characters are sketched very lightly, little more than a list of names; Monty, Redge and Jim. The adoption of male personae is also claimed by Faderman as a form of lesbian encoding and she suggests two reasons for their use in Mews poetry. They provide a disguise for expressing sexual desire for the female body but may also indicate that Mew saw herself as an invert, possessing a male soul. She does not consider the possibility that Mews male impersonations may also be a means of interrogating masculine views and values. In The Farmers Bride the male speaker is a means of focusing the gaze on the female character and a disguise for expressing sexual desire, but he also represents the patriarchal system which oppresses the young bride and seeks to tame her. We caught her, fetched her home at last And turned the key upon her, fast. In the shortest stanza of the poem he seems to understand the wildness of her nature. Shy as a leveret, swift as he, Straight and slight as a young larch tree, Sweet as the first wild violets , she, To her wild self. But what to me? The accumulation of soft, liquid sounds is sensual but the emphatic placing of she at the end of the third line stresses that the girls eroticism is as self-contained as this quatraine with its single rhyme and controlled metre. This controlled form also expresses the restraint of the farmers passion which only breaks free in the last three lines of the poem where long vowels voice a drawn-out cry of pain. Oh ! my God ! the down The soft young down of her, the brown, The brown of her her eyes, her hair, her hair ! Many of Mews poems make references to a womans hair, which Faderman claims as another indication of a lesbian sensibility, and it is through the use of such recurring images and themes that one catches glimpses of Mews secret self. Mew was fascinated by the story of Lizzie Siddalls hair growing so much after death that when her body was exhumed by Rossetti, it filled the coffin, and there are references to this in her poetry.  In Monsieur qui passe, the womans hair, described as blood dipped in gold, has outlived the rest of her beauty which is turning yellow, getting old. In The Forest Road, the lovers hair seems to contain her soul, surviving beyond death. But death would spare the glory of your head In the long sweetness of the hair that does not die : Hair is used as a symbol of female sexuality. In There shall be no night there, the speaker longs to loose thy hair / For kisses swift and sweet as falling rain but in The Forest Road it becomes a trap, a hindrance to creativity, from which the speaker must break free. I must unloose this hair that sleeps and dreams About my face, and clings like the brown weed To drowned, delivered things, tossed by the tired sea Back to the beaches. Oh ! your hair ! In The Fte, however, it is associated with spirituality. Only the hair / Of any woman can belong to God. and in Madeleine in Church, the physical and spiritual are entwined in the image of Mary Magdalene wiping the feet of Christ with her hair. Her love for Christ is far removed from earthly cares and earthly fears but can only be expressed in a physical way. Another recurring feature in Mews poetry is displacement through the use of an extended analogy. In Friend, Wherefore -?, a strong and assertive I and an intensity of emotional expression seem to indicate that the Mew is indeed trying to go deep and speak the secret self but the sense of betrayal is displaced into the powerful analogy of Christs betrayal by Judas. I will not count the years there are days too And tonight again I have said What if you should be lying dead? Well, if it were so, I could only lay my head Quietly on the pillow of my bed Thinking of Him on whom poor sufferers cried Suffering Himself so much before He died : And then of Judas walking three years by His side How Judas kissed Him how He was crucified. Always when I see you I see those two; Oh! God it is true We do not, all of us, know what we do; But Judas knew. Although the tone is deeply personal, the subjective I is ungendered. Faderman argues that this is another lesbian encoding technique as a reader who does not know otherwise will automatically presume a male speaker and a heterosexual relationship. The theme of desertion and passive suffering also place the poem in the feminine tradition of the suffering singer derived from contemporary views of Sappho, but the use of an ungendered I may also express a desire to free the self completely from gender-construction. In I Have Been Through the Gates the extended analogy again has a religious flavour but also a dreamlike quality. The vision of a city like the reconstructed Jerusalem in Revelation, with its palaces and pinnacles and shining towers turns into a nightmare vision of dereliction and corruption, forsaken by great winds and the heavenly / rain, unclean and unswept. The use of the pronoun his indicating a heterosexual relationship suggests that this poem is also using the conventions of the suffering singer but this may also be an example of a bearded pronoun, another encoding technique to mask a lesbian sensibility. The dream is another recurring image in Mews poetry. In Freudian psychology dreams are seen as the site of disguised messages related to sexuality and in Ne me tangito the figure of the dream seems to express wish fulfilment about a relationship. Again the poem uses a religious reference. The title is a variant of the words from St. Johns gospel, Noli me tangere (Do not touch me) and the quotation from Luke, vii, 39, refers to Mary Magdalene, a sinner. The words from John, expressing the resurrected Christs rejection of worldly attachments before his ascension into heaven, reflect Mews view of human relationships as opposed to poetic creativity. Yet in the dream sequence in the second half of the poem human attachments and creativity seem to be inextricably tangled in an image of motherhood. My breast was bared But sheltered by my hair I found you, suddenly, lying there, Tugging with tiny fingers at my heart, no more afraid : The weakest thing, the most divine That ever yet was mine, Something that I had strangely made, So then it seemed - The child for which I had not looked or ever cared, Of whom, before, I had never dreamed. The child is a transformation of the lover, diminished to the tug of tiny fingers, and a symbol of creativity, both of which are controlled by the mother figure of the speaker. In Do Dreams Lie Deeper ? the speaker is buried but still alive, a possibility which terrified Mew, yet the tone is calm, even light-hearted. What the dreams are remains ambiguous but they come from the essential self or soul of the speaker. There is something more my own, he said, Than hands or feet or this restless head That must be buried when I am dead. They are spoken of fondly as children with physical attributes, little eyes and very lovely faces but they also have a spiritual quality, being not of the earth and not of the sea but as ephemeral as the flakes of the falling snow. The dreams could represent poems revealing a secret self which the speaker feels must be buried, but there is no certainty that this is possible. The question of the title remains unanswered. The Trumpet may wake every other speaker. Do dreams lie deeper - ? The conflict between the public persona presented to society and the secret self of the poetic imagination is the theme of one of Mews own favourite poems, Fame. It illustrates the cryptic style derived from displacement and condensation of meaning which, together with recurring themes and images , give her work that highly individual tone which Angela Leighton describes as quirky originality. Sometimes in the over-heated house, but not for long, Smirking and speaking rather loud, I see myself among the crowd, Where no one fits the singer to his song, Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces Of the people who are always on my stair; They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places; But could I spare, In the blind Earths great silences and spaces, The din, the scuffle, the long stare If I went back and it was not there? Back to the old known things that are the new, The folded glory of the gorse, the sweet-briar air, To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do And the divine, wise trees that do not care. Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair ! God ! If I might ! And before I go hence Take in her stead To our tossed bed, One little dream, no matter how small, how wild. Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence --- A frail, dead new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white, A blot upon the night, The moons dropped child ! Society is presented as an over-heated house where the speaker is confined and cannot behave naturally. The stair, the means of escape, is blocked by too many other people who cannot differentiate between unpainted and painted faces, between mask and reality. The poets secret self remains hidden because no one fits the singer to his song. There is a marked contrast between the house, with its din and scuffle and the blind Earths great silences and spaces which feed the poets vision, but this opposition is couched in a question, revealing the speakers uncertainty about being able to survive without other people. The speaker is drawn to the beauty and indifference of the larks and divine, wise trees but is still attracted to Fame, personified as a lover, with bright hair. The sexually charged image of the tossed bed leads into that of the dream which is small and wild, like the farmers bride and the changeling child. But the dream becomes the nightmare image of a stillbirth which Mew also uses in Saturday Market. Unlike the red, dead thing of that poem, a symbol of desire which must be rejected, the aborted lamb is ghostly and pitiful and white, another manifestation of the ghostly outcast but also, being white, an image of creativity. The last line of the poem is also the most condensed. If we read the image of the moon as a classical allusion, it refers not only to the female cycle of fertility but also to chastity, for although Artemis, the moon goddess, was originally a goddess of fertility, she came to be regarded as a virgin and demanded chastity of her followers. If the aborted lamb symbolises poetry, then the verb dropped becomes more than the usual term for the birth of an animal. It signifies both the act of creation and the end of it. It also has the connotation of being passed over, which was part of Mews experience as a poet. Hermione Lees selection of short stories in The Secret Self /2 is based on the criteria that they contain the disclosure of a private, alternative imaginative vision in some ways alien to the normal socialized world which yet remains recognizable and authentic and that while they deal with the particular and the personal, their deep or hidden imaginative lives are always in negotiation with experience, time, history, responsibility. I think this description could be applied to the poetry of Charlotte Mew but I also feel, to use Dora Greenwells words, that she leaves the reader with the impression that some intimate secret were at once communicated and withheld and that this built in ambiguity enriches her poetry. Although biographical information was frowned on by the New Critics and the death of the author was announced by Roland Barthes in 1968, I think it is justifiable to use information about Mews life to set the poems in their historical context and to give substance to a homeless ghost who was neglected for too long. The search to establish her sexual identity has enriched the interpretation of her work, adding another dimension to the figure of the outcast in her poetry. However, her use of an ungendered I and her admiration for what she saw as the sexless and almost inhuman quality of Emily Bronts poetry suggests a rejection of the dichotomy between masculine and feminine forms of expression. This is the position advocated by Julia Kristeva in Womens Time (1977), where this dichotomy, seen as belonging to metaphysics, challenges the notion of a stable identity. What can identity, even sexual identity, mean in a new theoretical and scientific space where the very notion of identity is challenged ? The implications of this position will be discussed in Chapter Three. CHAPTER THREE The Divided Self I think it is myself I go to meet. (The Quiet House, The Farmers Bride, 1916) It is understandable that critics such as Lillian Faderman have felt it necessary to establish the identity of women writers, their secret selves, as a strategy in recovering their work from what Charlotte Mew described as the lumber room of literature. This approach, which also informs Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubars influential book The Madwoman in the Attic, implies a liberal humanist concept of an essential, unified female self which emerges in a writers work. Such an approach runs the risk of reading works by women as only autobiography and ignores the challenge made to the concept of a stable identity by psychoanalysis and by French literary theory. In his re-reading of Freud, who explained the mind as a complex structure of which the conscious self is only one part, Lacan describes the individuals first experience of self as one of fragmentation.  This view informs the thinking of Julia Kristeva who rejects an essentialist view of the self and believes both the meaning and the subject of any text to be fluid, en procs. Like Derrida, she believes that meaning in a text is achieved through the free play of the signifier and as such is always deferred or displaced so that the reassurance of closure is never possible and the text is opened up to a variety of interpretations. I believe that such a reading of Mews poetry shows that the displacements she employs to defend a stable identity actually serve to reveal a self that is divided or fragmented. Alida Monro described Mew as very much two people, ascribing her singular double personality to the marked difference between her public and private personae. While this is true for many people, in Mews case the gap between the two may well have been greater because of the need to hide secrets about family madness and her own sexuality. Monro asserts that she was unaware of the warring pair within her but Mews admiration for Emily Bront, based on a belief that her poetry expressed her veritable self, could indicate an awareness of the divisions within herself. Also, consciously or unconsciously, these divisions emerge in the themes and forms of her poetry, as can be seen in the poems already discussed in other chapters. In Nunhead Cemetery studies the fragmentation of the self in its most extreme form in the total disintegration of the mind into madness but Mews poetry is mainly concerned with the fragmentation experienced by women as part of everyday life. Mew examines this fragmentation in the roles of child, lover, wife, mother, and in The Quiet House, the speaker rejects them all as unsatisfactory, and is compelled to seek another. I think it is myself I go to meet. An awareness of divisions within the self also emerges in her work in poems about the traditionally opposite extremes of female sexuality, the nun and the whore, while others, such as The Call, represent human attachments and poetic creativity as opposing drives. Stylistically, the divided self is expressed in a variety of ways. In At The Convent Gate, Mew uses the form of a dialogue to express the conflicting drives towards human passion and divine love. Why do you shrink and start away, and stare ? Life frowns to see you leaning at deaths gate Not back, but on. Ah ! sweet, it is too late : You cannot cast these kisses from your hair. Will Gods cold breath blow kindly anywhere Upon such burning gold ? Oh ! lips worn white With waiting ! Love will blossom in a night And you shall wake to find the roses there ! Oh hush ! He seems to stir, He lifts His Head. He smiles. Look where he hangs against the sky. He never smiled nor stirred, that God of pain With tired eyes and limbs above my bed But loose me, this is death, I will not die Not while He smiles. Oh ! Christ, Thine own again ! The poem is split into two stanzas with a different speaker in each. In the first, the lover argues for a life of human love expressed in the sensual image of the womans hair. In the second, the woman is won over by an equally human trait, a smile. The poem is built on oppositions and Mew uses the contrast between red (implied in the roses)and white (the womans lips) to express human passion and the lack of it. For the lover, the woman is choosing between the life and death of human love and the convent is seen as deaths gate. For the woman, the choice seems to be between the life and death of her soul, and it is the embrace of the lover that is death, yet , paradoxically, her relationship with Christ is expressed passionately in physical, human terms. As Angela Leighton points out, this poem seems to echo The Convent Threshold by Christina Rossetti. Like Mew, Rossetti was a very private person but in her poetry she achieves what Isobel Armstrong describes as impersonal self-exposure, through the use of various masks. In The Convent Threshold, a dramatic monologue, this is done by assuming a persona similar to the woman in Mews poem, a character torn between human and divine love. Rossetti makes use of one of Mews favourite images, the stair, to indicate a movement towards heaven and an image of hair to represent sexuality. The speaker describes the golden windy hair afloat of men and women but also refers briefly to My hair which you shall see no more. The poem also makes use of dream sequences to represent the struggle between opposing drives, one of Mews devices for exploring the conflict between human attachments and poetic creativity. Leighton points out the correspondence of several of Mews poems with poems by Rossetti, including Rossettis Remember me when I am gone away and Mews A Farewell, which was not published in Mews lifetime, possibly because she felt it was too close to Rossettis model. Both poems address former lovers and ask to be remembered, not sadly but with a smile and both display a split in the consciousness of the speaker.  The poems are close in their structure and metre. Each has fourteen lines of iambic pentameter and a regular rhyming scheme. Rossettis poem has a continuous Petrarchan sonnet form with a change of emphasis from the octet to the sestet. This reflects a change in the consciousness of the speaker from being centred on her own feelings to an imaginative creation of those of her lover. Mews poem also falls into two parts of eight and six lines but they are written as separate stanzas. The first concentrates on the speakers sense of betrayal but the second moves from speculation about her replacement to sympathetic identification with the other woman. Only I wish her eyes may not be blue, The eyes of the new angel. Ah! She may Miss something that I found, - perhaps the clue To those long silences of yours, which grew Into one word. And should she not be gay, Poor lady! Well, she too must have her day! Mew and Rossetti are also linked by their struggle with Christian belief. Mew admired Emily Bronts genius as being purely spiritual but she also saw her as a pagan above all with a freedom she herself could never attain because of her deep involvement with Christianity. Like Christina Rossetti, Mews poetry expresses divine and human love with equal intensity and both poets are divided in their attitude to Christianity. They wrote poems which attest to a firm belief in Christianity but others express doubts about divine love which is felt to be no more constant than human love. There is no questioning in Rossettis A Christmas Carol, and in Up-Hill all the questions of the pilgrim are answered positively, but Weary in Well Doing strikes a different note. God is described as a perverse tyrant who can break the speakers heart like a lover, so that her soul is wrung with doubts that lurk / And vex it so and the journey of faith is reduced to plod and moil. The title of Mews last poem in the 1916 edition of The Farmers Bride, Exspecto Resurrectionem, expresses a conventional Christian belief in the salvation of the soul. Val Warner argues that this lyric, combined with the epigraph at the beginning of the edition, (He asked life of Thee and Thou gavest him/ a long life ; even for ever and ever) cancels out the doubts of the penultimate poem, Madeleine in Church. I find that, on the contrary, it makes these doubts even more striking, especially when they are expressed in other poems too. In Absence which expresses a conflict between sexual passion and religious morality, the rejection of Christ is expressed in a startling and disturbing physical image. But call, call, and though Christ stands Still with scarred hands Over my mouth, I must answer. So, I will come He shall let me go ! A Question makes an interrogation of the meaning of the crucifixion which is developed in Madeleine in Church. If Christ was crucified Ah ! God are we Not scourged, tormented, mocked and called to pay The sin of ages in our little day Has man no crown of thorns, no Calvary, Though Christ has tasted of his agony ? We knew no Eden and the poisoned fruit We did not pluck, yet from the bitter root We sprang, maimed branches of iniquity. Have we who share the heritage accurst Wrought nothing ? Tainted to the end of time, The last frail souls still suffer for the first Blind victims of an everlasting crime. Ask of the Crucified, Who hangs enthroned, If man oh! God, man too has not atoned ! The image of the crucified Christ appears static when compared to the piling up of verbs to describe human experience and the next three lines all begin with We, placing the emphasis again on human suffering. The injustice of the concept of original sin is expressed through the image of the apple as poisoned by a cruel God and the distorted image of the tree of knowledge with people as maimed branches of iniquity. The second stanza is an expression of outrage at the inherited guilt of Blind victims of an everlasting crime and the final couplet points out the alienating distance between the divine role of Christ who is enthroned on his cross and the anonymous, human suffering of man. This poem is a powerful questioning of Christian doctrine, a passionate invective that is only controlled by the regularity of the metre and the rhyming scheme. The similarities between A Question and Madeleine in Church suggest that it may have been the prototype for the longer poem, but it cannot be proved as the poem was not published in Mews lifetime and there is no record of when it was composed. Division is inherent in the form of the dramatic monologue which Mew chose for many of her poems, as it contains both the voice of the speaker and that of the poet. This enables what Alan Sinfield describes as oblique self-expression, a restatement of what Browning says in The Ring and The Book. Art may tell a truth / Obliquely.(section XII, l.855)  Mew makes a versatile and innovative use of this form which she may have been attracted to because, like prose fiction, it has an element of narrative and emphasises character and she had achieved success with her short stories before any of her poetry was published. However, Mew, like most other women poets, has been displaced from the tradition of the dramatic monologue. Although the dramatic monologue was not a Victorian invention, it is often discussed as if the only significant exponents of it were Browning and Tennyson. As Cynthia Scheinberg points out, this is true of Robert Langbaum in his influential book, The Poetry of Experience (1957) and also, more surprisingly, of Elizabeth Howes much more recent book, The Dramatic Monologue, (1996). Although Langbaum rejects the idea that the dramatic monologue has declined since Browning, and speaks of the developing life of the form, the only woman poet he mentions is Amy Lowell. Howe includes Christina Rossetti, as well as Lowell, in a list of poets producing a veritable spate of dramatic monologues in the second half of the nineteenth century, but other female and male poets are passed over in her statement, A host of minor poets also contributed to the genre. (p.57) Their contributions are dismissed because they were often melodramatic or maudlin in tone and did not develop the psychology of the speaker (xiii). Howe obviously does not agree with Isobel Armstrong that it was the women poets who invented the dramatic monologue. Armstrong makes a convincing case for her assertion, tracing a development of speaking in another womans voice from Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon to Augusta Webster and Amy Levy. Charlotte Mew is not included as Armstrong does not consider her to belong to the Victorian period. I presume that it is for the same reason that she is not included in Cynthia Scheinbergs list of women contributors to the genre, which adds Charlotte Bront, Mary Robinson, Adelaide Procter and Mathilde Blind to those mentioned by Armstrong. A comparison of Brownings My Last Duchess (described by Dorothy Mermin as generally being taken for the prototypical dramatic monologue) with Madeleine in Church reveals how Mew has developed this form to suit her own needs. While both poems are concerned with gender roles, Browning chooses a medieval setting for his poem but Mews is contemporary. This is true of all her poetry and while a lack of historical settings may simply be because she had little formal education, it may also be that she shared Elizabeth Barrett Brownings commitment to the live throbbing age and had no interest in trundling back her soul five hundred years, / Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle court. Browning uses a male speaker and the Duchess is the object of his male gaze and of the poet too. The Duke also offers her up to the gaze of his male visitor. Willt please you sit and look at her ? Mews poem has a female speaker who is also the object of the poem but as speaking subject is in control of her objectivity. In the poem she is only the object of her own gaze but this is also turned on her mother who, like the Duchess, is fixed in eternal youth as a painting. In life, the Duchess was passive and compliant and the Duke still controls her in death. His words, none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I are an expression of the same power behind the words, I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together. By contrast, Madeleine is in control of her own life, and of the men in it. (I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him tonight.) Brownings Duke has a silent auditor, the envoy who has come to negotiate terms for a new marriage, but Mews poem is an example of what Arnold called the dialogue of the mind with itself. Although there are times in the poem when she addresses the crucifix, she does not expect a reply. In both poems the speakers reveal their characters through the style and tone of what they say. Brownings poem is a continuous sequence of iambic pentameter in rhyming couplets which express the control of the Duke over the world of the poem. The effect of the couplets is counteracted to some extent by the use of enjambment, questions and interjections to imitate the natural pauses and hesitations of speech. Mew also uses these devices plus current slang and idiomatic expressions. Madeleine refers to going down like scuttled ships and the old crew but there are other moments when the language is heightened as the poem passes into another area of the speakers consciousness, for this poem also expresses the divisions of the conscious mind. The poem opens in the church but moves with Madeleines thoughts to different times and locations, from Here, in the darkness with the plaster saint and the crucifix in the distance, to the hateful day of the divorce, to thoughts of past lovers, and back again to the poor saint with his tin-pot crown and the sight of the crucifix. This circular movement is repeated throughout the poem, triggered by different associations, and always returning to its central concern, the figure of the crucified Christ. The poem is built on divisions and contrasts. Like The Quiet House, it expresses dissatisfaction with the roles into which a womans life is split. Madeleine refuses these as tame , bloodless things and rejects the Ibsenesque image of the dolls house. The disparity between youth and age and her fear of growing old is expressed through the contrast of her mothers face in the portrait, with the youngest smile, and her memory of it as a mask, shrunk and small. The division between physicality and spirituality is examined by linking Madeleine with the figure of the Magdalen, the subject of an earlier poem, She was a Sinner. As the title implies, this poem associates sexuality with sin and guilt, as does Pcheresse, but Madeleines attitude is closer to that of the fallen woman in Le Sacr-Coeur, who cynically rejects Christs salvation as another form of buying her services. He is the Man who bought you first. While Madeleine accepts her sexuality, her defiant We are what we are has been won through a struggle with herself. The poem takes us back to a time when joy and pain were almost dissolved, but in her description of her own body, she seems to stand outside it and see it as something alien. I could hardly bear The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk, The thick, close voice of musk; The jessamine music on the thin night air, Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair The lines vary in length to capture the pattern of her thoughts and the stanza moves towards a reconciliation of these two selves and a rejection of the Christian dichotomy between body and soul. I think my body was my soul. Madeleines response to Christ has to be on a human, physical level. She is unable to break free of her sensual nature, which knows how jewels taste, for the grey conventionality of Christian morals. While Madeleines acceptance of her sexuality reconciles the oppositions of sin and grace and so removes one source of division in the self, she is still wracked with religious doubt and a longing for a relationship with Christ. At the beginning of the poem, she prefers to pray to a little saint in the darkness, with whom she feels she has more in common, than to Christ in the open day. She even suggests cutting down Christs cross and leaving those of the two thieves who are sinners like herself and is only willing to submit to Christs love as a last resort. If there were no one else, could it be you? The division between conventional Christian belief and the experience of the speaker is expressed in a truly subversive parody of the parable of the Good Shepherd, where Mew presents us with a figure who seems to be his cruel alter ego. Find rest in Him One knows the parsons tags Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of baa-ing sheep : Yes, it may be, when He has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the bleating soul in us to rags, For so He giveth His belovd sleep. Oh ! He will take us stripped and done, Driven into His heart. So are we won : Then safe, safe are we ? in the shelter of His everlasting wings I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things ! Division is inherent in the language and form of the stanza. The second line is split into two, the final clause ironically undermining the tranquil image of the first two. The language itself is split between religious phraseology and images of violence and slaughter. The description of the carnage of the sheep, with its piling up of clauses, pushes the line out, contrasting ironically with the tame, static image of For so He giveth His belovd sleep. I think this is an example of what Kristeva describes as the semiotic, the drive to communicate, dictating the form of the symbolic, in this case the metre of the poem. The soft, slow sounds of this line contrast with the short, hard, dynamic verbs that follow : stripped, done, driven. The image of safety in the shelter of His everlasting wings is undermined by another disruption, the questioning repetition of the word safe, and the final image is one of division or fragmentation. His arms are full of broken things. It is not surprising that the first firm selected to print the 1916 edition of The Farmers Bride withdrew because their compositor found this poem blasphemous. There is also a striking division between theme and form in Mews ironic use of the regular metre of a prayer, reinforced by end rhymes, and suggesting stability and piety to express sentiments that are both rebellious and despairing. Oh ! quiet Christ who never knew The poisonous fangs that bite us through And make us do the things we do, See how we suffer and fight and die, How helpless and how low we lie God holds You and You hang so high, Though no one looking long at You Can think You do not suffer too, But, up there, from your still, star-lighted tree What can You know, what can You really see Of this dark ditch, the soul of me ! Division emerges through contrasting images. Christ is inactive, quiet and still but evil is shown to be active in the forceful image of the serpents bite and the human race too is seen to be in constant, restless motion; we suffer and fight and die. Christ hangs high above it all on his beautiful, but remote star-lighted tree, a condensed image which links the crucifixion with the stable in Bethlehem, but the speakers place, far below, is captured in the stark image of the last line, the dark ditch of Madeleines soul. Madeleine in Church shows a self divided about religious faith and its form mimics the divisions of the human consciousness. This fracturing of consciousness is also expressed generally in Mews poetry by her use of a wide variety of personae, both male and female. This was disconcerting to at least one contemporary reader, William Scawen Blunt, who complained, the difficulty of getting at a complete understanding of the position is increased in Miss Mews case by her writing sometimes as a man and sometimes as a woman, which also I consider a great mistake as it always takes away something of the poems sincerity. A woman ought always to write like a woman This criticism obviously derives from a view of poetry as the expression of the poets inner self, especially in the case of a woman, but Mew is not inhibited about imitating male predecessors, such as Browning, Tennyson and Arnold, who all made use of female, as well as male, personae. Most of Mews dialect poems have male speakers, which Faderman suggests is an indication that Mew saw herself as possessing a male soul. In Arracombe Wood, Old Shepherds Prayer and The Rambling Sailor, however, the speakers are chosen for their traditional occupations which make them outsiders and I believe that this is what determines their gender. Mew could have used a woman farm labourer in Arracombe Wood, but a woman would not have been defined by her work in the same way as a man, and would probably not have been given the same opportunity for solitude. In The Farmers Bride, where Mew could have chosen the bride as speaker, I think her decision to impersonate the farmer is more significant, as it enables her to express desire for the female body. Edgell Rickword commented on the inconsistency of the voice in this poem, arguing that the rather watery dialect seems to disappear in the section beginning Shy as a leveret and ending with Some other in the house than we ! There is a change in the speakers voice at this point which may indicate that the mask has slipped for a moment and allowed the poets voice to take over. Two other dialect poems, An Ending and Sea Love, give no clues to the gender of the speaker. The first speaks of an absent woman and the second of a broken relationship with a man but neither poem makes it clear whether the relationship is a homosexual or heterosexual one. This ambiguity challenges the idea of immutably fixed gender identities. In some poems, however, the problem of gender is solved by its total absence. It is simply displaced out of the poem. There are two short poems where I think this occurs; Afternoon Tea, and Smile, Death. These poems give no indication of the gender of the speaker and no suggestion of a sexual relationship and both have a light playful tone. Afternoon Tea expresses the division between a social city self and one that longs for the solitude of the countryside but it rattles along through four short, regular verses, using a bantering tone to describe both the good five oclock people and the speakers own lack of small talk, my last hatful of words. Although the theme of Smile Death is more solemn, the tone is again light-hearted and the speakers are ungendered. Smile, Death, see I smile as I come to you Straight from the road and the moor that I leave behind, Nothing on earth to me was like this wind-blown space, Nothing was like the road, but at the end there was a vision or a face And the eyes were not always kind. Smile, death, as you fasten the blades to my feet for me, On, on let us skate past the sleeping willows dusted with snow ; Fast, fast down the frozen stream, with the moor and the road and the vision behind, (Show me your face, why the eyes are kind !) And we will not speak of life or believe in it or remember it as we go. This description of a white world recalls Christina Rossettis Winter : My Secret where it froze and blows and snows and the unusual personification of Death as a skating partner is both playful and striking. The division in this poem is between the past sense of self and the present one, and this dictates the structure. The poem falls into two halves with a perfect balance between the stanzas. Although no direct question is asked, issues raised in the first stanza are resolved in the second. The road, the moor and the vision which were so important to the former self are swiftly left behind and Death is welcomed. The repetitions (On, on and Fast, fast) give the second stanza a dynamic thrust as the speaker rushes happily towards oblivion where all differences and divisions will cease to exist. A variety of divisions emerge in Mews poetry : the split between private and public personae, the opposing needs for society and for solitude, the acceptance and rejection of Christian belief, the contradictions of the conscious and unconscious mind, the conflict between sexuality and poetic creativity. These form yet another link between Mew and Christina Rossetti, whose poems are often characterised by binary oppositions in her choice of titles ( Bitter for Sweet, Life and Death, Is and Was) and in the use of a pair of opposing characters, such as Lizzie and Laura in Goblin Market. Taken overall, however, Mews divisions reveal a self that is fragmented rather than simply divided and it is this fragmentation, and Mews adaptation of metre and line length to express it, that are seen by some critics as Modernist elements in her poetry. CHAPTER FOUR The Changeling It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best, She gave you something altogether new. (Madeleine in Church, The Farmers Bride, 1916) In 1920, after reading The Farmers Bride, Virginia Woolf wrote about Charlotte Mew. I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else. How she is unlike anyone else is what I hope to show in this concluding chapter and to what extent her originality contributes towards the development of Modernist poetry while remaining rooted in a Victorian tradition. If one accepts the critical divisions created by canonisation, then Mew seems to be a transitional poet, falling between the Victorian and Modernist canons. Nor does she seem to belong with the Georgian poets, although in The Open University course, Literature in the Modern World, The Farmers Bride is discussed briefly by Angus Calder as a Georgian poem. He comments on her use of dialect as Hardyesque but notes that the poem is disturbing rather than inspirational or nostalgic as might be expected from a Georgian poem. It was certainly too unsettling for Walter De La Mare who advised Edward Marsh against its inclusion in Georgian Poetry. Links between Hardys work and this poem have been suggested, other than the use of dialect. Mary Davidow makes much of a resemblance between the character of the farmers bride and Sue Brideshead in Jude the Obscure, who goes to great lengths to avoid sleeping with her husband. She even suggests that this character was modelled on Mew and that a number of her poems contain references which imply that Mew knew Hardy long before their recorded meeting in 1918. Mew was certainly a great admirer of Hardy and may have been influenced by his work, or indeed have met him earlier than 1918, but I dont think this is of great significance for her poetry. Points of resemblance can be found between them, including a dramatic approach which colours much of their poetry and the expression of a sense of loss, but Hardy never experiments with metrical variation within one poem as Mew does. In The Farmers Bride, a basic four beat line is extended by extra syllables (So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down) expressing the length of the search, and in the final stanza the metre falters and almost disintegrates through the use of exclamations and dashes which disrupt the rhythm. The passionate expression of this poem is a distinctive characteristic of Mews writing but it is passion controlled, creating tension and conflict, and expressed through vivid and highly condensed imagery, and a modern voice seems to speak in the natural diction and idiomatic expressions. In the following lines, for example, a powerful, compressed simile is couched in the rhythms and diction of the farmers natural discourse. When us was wed she turned afraid Of love and me and all things human ; Like the shut of a winters day. Her smile went out, and twasnt a woman More like a little frightened fay. One night, in the Fall, she runned away. The third line brings the poem to a halt and the image of light extinguished is reinforced by the first half of the next line. Paradoxically, Mew is often at her most passionate when rejecting physical passion in the pursuit of a cold aesthetic, as in this passage from The Forest Road. Shut, scared eyes , Poor, desolate, desperate hands, it is not I Who thrust you off. No, take your hands away I cannot strike your lonely hands. Yes, I have struck your heart, It did not come so near. Then lie you there Dear and wild heart behind this quivering snow With two red stains upon it : and I will strike and tear Mine out, and scatter it to yours. Mew believed that the quality of emotion is the first requirement of poetry and that for good work one must accept the discipline that can be got, while the emotion is given to one. At her best, in Madeleine in Church, for example, emotion is disciplined, although always threatening to break out of the form that controls it, but at her worst, she strikes a melodramatic tone. In Le Sacr-Coeur, for example, the personification of Paris as a harlot, with hot white hands, the scarlet lips, the scented hair seems overworked. Also, the second half of the poem contains so much French as to make it incomprehensible to a non-French speaker and, as it is not really necessary for establishing the character of the speaker, seems rather like showing off. In 1921, Mews work was satirised in Punch by Edward V. Knox in a parody called The Circus Clown. This plays on characteristic images, themes and expressions that recur in Mews poetry, as can be seen from the following excerpt. The moonlight drips on the parlour floor ; I shall go mad if no one wipes it up. When I was one year old Nurse used to say, Its no more use to cry when milk is spilt Than cry about the moon. There were big bars Across the nursery window. You said once, Life is all bars on which we beat in vain Praying for drinks. I smiled when you said that. I wonder why it was you made me smile ? I think because you had a funny face, White as the moonlight, and a red, red nose, And the moon dripped upon the floor like this Two years ago. The floor looked just the same. There is something very terrible about a floor. Some phrases are more or less lifted from the poems; old Nurse used to say comes from The Quiet House and the last line changes only one word from There is something terrible about a child from In Nunhead Cemetery. Knox uses Mews recurring image of the moon and the contrasts of red and white and there is a reference to the theme of madness. The simplicity and directness of Mews diction is reproduced plus her use of repetition and question. The rest of the parody refers to other poems from The Farmers Bride, picking up Mews fondness for French phrases and constant references to womens hair. What it does not show is Mews subtle use of a variety of metre and form, sometimes within the same poem. Knox tries to reproduce the halting rhythms of The Forest Road, created by splitting some lines up syntactically. The boughs are like crossed bars, crossed window bars. The moon drips through them. Are not those wolves eyes, Green in the dusk ? I always hated green. This is a crude rendering of what Mew actually achieves, as the following short extract illustrates. Is it the music of a larger place ? It makes our room too small ; it is like a stair, A calling stair that climbs up to a smile you scarcely see, Dim but so waited for ; and you know what a smile is, how it calls, How if I smiled you always ran to me. The three short phrases of the first line are followed by one long one in line two and this pattern is repeated in lines three and four. An answer to the question of line one is built up gradually through repetitions of stair and smile, while the pause created in the third line with a comma , turns the focus back onto the lover and the climbing rhythm of the piled up clauses comes to a rest in the following line. This image of music as a climbing stair can be traced to Mews love of Wagners music which often builds up in this way. In her essay on Emily Bront, Mew refers to the great Tannhauser overture to illustrate the effect of Bronts poem How Clear She Shines and her own poetry, like Wagners music, is built around leitmotivs. The first use of a leitmotiv was in Clari or The Maid of Milan, an opera produced in London in 1832 where the song, Home, Sweet, Home occurred in various forms. An ironic interpretation of one line of this song, (Theres no place like home) runs through Mews work as a leitmotiv in her depiction of outcasts and wanderers. (See Chapter 1). Mew has been claimed both as a Victorian and as a Modernist poet. Angela Leighton argues that stylistically Mew looks forward to Modernism but her sensibilities and themes are rooted in the Victorian era. Kathleen Bell takes issue with this, arguing that looking at Mews poems in the contexts of the publications in which they first appeared reveals that her themes are of the twentieth century too, reflecting the concerns of her own time. She points out that The Nation, where The Farmers Bride was first published in 1912, was carrying articles and letters at the time debating what should be the proper relations between men and women within marriage. However, this was not only an issue in 1912. This debate was already in full swing in the Victorian era and continues today. Bell also argues that the publication of The Fte in The Egoist, which was associated with the avant-garde and known for sexual daring, places the poem within a current trend which sought to displace the sense of danger from female to male sexuality. She describes the voice of the adolescent speaker as neurotic and traumatised and suggests that this links the poem with James Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was being serialised in The Egoist at the time. She also sees Mews Madeleine in Church as a contribution to a contemporary attempt to create sympathy for the sexual woman and to counteract an increasingly unsympathetic treatment of the fallen woman by male writers. While it is clear that Mew did not object to being published in these periodicals, I think it would be difficult to prove that she deliberately chose to be associated with the avant-garde. Since her brief association with The Yellow Book, Mew had chosen to be published in the highly respectable Temple Bar, but this had folded in 1905, and Mew published nothing else until 1909 when she sent Requiescat, an elegy reminiscent of Christina Rossettis Remember me, to The Nation. There is no record of why she chose this publication but it was only natural that she should send them her next poem, The Farmers Bride, as well. The Fte, entrusted by Mew to May Sinclair who had taken her up at this time, was shown to Ezra Pound who suggested the English Review or Poetry before deciding to publish it himself in The Egoist in 1914. In 1913, however, The Changeling and The Pedlar were published in The Englishwoman, a short-lived monthly, whose other contributors were genteel ladies. I feel that Bell may be reading too much into the choice of publication for Mews poetry and it seems that although she liked to appear as a New Woman, she took little interest in politics and did not register to vote until 1923, although she was eligible in 1918. Bell offers the fragmentariness of Mews style and themes as an illustration of her Modernist tendencies but as Kathryn Burlinson points out in an essay on Emily Bront, even if the instability of subjectivity is seen as a primary preoccupation of modernism, it is clearly not confined therein. Her discussion of Bronts explorations of identity and her questioning of the stable subject is totally at odds with Mews opinion of her poetry as the reconciliation of opposites. Burlinson concedes that Bronts exploration and questioning may be relevant to the discussion not only of Romantic and Victorian verse, but also of modernist writing and I believe that the same can be said of Mews treatment of the fragmentation of the subject, her experimentation with form and metre, and her use of a stream of consciousness technique. However, it is my opinion that although these elements constitute a significant contribution to Modernism, they are developed from the concerns and experiments of Victorian poetry. Isobel Armstrong demonstrates that much of Victorian womens poetry was concerned with the dissolving selfhood and that the choice of the double form of the dramatic monologue reflects the contradictory experience of womens lives. She also argues that because of the restraints upon them, women poets were forced into innovations in language and form. So Mews mixing of genres, by her application of a technique associated with prose writing to poetry, has a Victorian precedent in Elizabeth Barrett Brownings experiment with Aurora Leigh as a verse-novel. One of Mews most formally experimental poems is curiously enough one of her earliest ones, An Ending, dating from the 1890s. The poem has three stanzas and is a dramatic monologue written in dialect. Unlike Mews other monologues there is a human auditor, the Sir addressed at the beginning of the second stanza, probably a clergyman as he suggests to the speaker the consolation of a heavenly golden street. It does not become clear until this second stanza that this is a deathbed scene as the first one simply describes past meetings between the speaker and his lover. As in other poems, the conventional view of heaven is rejected in favour of the more natural yellow wheat and a reunion with his lover. In the final stanza Mew again expresses the disintegration of consciousness, this time the fragmentation of the dying mind. There is great variation in the metre with lines ranging from only two stresses to some with six. Rhyme is used throughout to create structural unity but it follows no regular scheme. The last stanza is the most unusual as it mimics the disintegration of the mind with short broken phrases punctuated by dashes, and exclamation marks, very reminiscent of the style of Emily Dickinson. Another hour ? An hour to wait ! I sim Ill meet her at the gate You know that road beside the sea The crooked street the wavin wheat (Whats that ? A lamp ! Et made me start ) Thats where our feet wed used to meet on quiet nights- My God ! the ships es showing lights ! Wed used to part. Most of this stanza is made up of fragments of the first one and this repetition is not only natural but necessary as a unifying element in what could otherwise be an incomprehensible babble of speech. Eliot and Pound acknowledged their debt to Browning but, although Mew was described by H. D. as a new blossom from the seed of Brownings sowing, and developed the dramatic monologue ( used by Eliot in The Waste Land) into a much more flexible form, her contribution to the genre has until recently been ignored. She has also been displaced from a retrospectively conceived definition of Modernism in which female poets are more or less ignored. Celeste M. Schenck argues for the dismantling of this monolithic Modernism, constructed by men, which has contributed to the marginalization of women poets. She points out that Peter Faulkners Modernist Reader (1986) has only two female contributors out of a total of fourteen. Yet men and women writers in this period, as in any other, must have known of each others work. Schenck proposes the substitution of plural modernisms embracing the work of many women poets, including Mew, and Bell agrees that if Mews modernity is to be properly acknowledged then the definition of Modernism has to change. Mews use of a kind of stream of consciousness is a Modernist technique. Mew was associated with May Sinclair, who first coined the term in a review of Dorothy Richardsons work, and who also used this technique in her own writing. Mew never used this technique herself in a short story but it emerges in her dramatic monologues. A reviewer wrote of The Farmers Bride, if we had flashed before us the swiftly changing kaleidoscope of the workings of anothers mind under some special impulse or impression it would probably seem unintelligible, at least at first. This is what Charlotte Mew attempts. In her longer monologues, Madeleine in Church, In Nunhead Cemetery and The Quiet House, where new trains of thought are triggered by association, the kaleidoscopic effect is even greater. Mews experiments were not always understood or appreciated. In a review of The Rambling Sailor, John Freeman wrote : She could put a constraint upon her deepest feelings, but none upon her form. In fact Mew was very particular about the form of her poetry and exercised great control over the presentation of her work. She insisted on keeping the very long lines in Madeleine in Church despite the problems this caused for the printer. In her Memoir, Alida Monro quotes two letters from Mew to Harold Monro on this subject, adding that Mew gave her carte blanche to correct the punctuation of her poems and accepted the cover design but not with any great enthusiasm.  This is not really surprising as C. Lovat Frasers drawing depicts a rather cosy-looking cottage which hardly captures the disturbing spirit of the title poem and suggests that he had not read it. (See Appendix.) A review of The Farmers Bride in The Nation speaks of the French spirit of Mews work. She was certainly well read in French literature and would probably have known the poetry of Jules Laforgue (1860-1887). Like Mew, his poetic output was small, consisting of two volumes of verse published between 1885 and 1887, but his influence was acknowledged by Eliot and Pound in the development of free verse. Mew experiments with verse forms but only The Forest Road, a continuous sequence of sixty-eight lines ranging from two to nine stresses and with no end rhymes, can be described as free verse. More often, she uses a regular metre but condenses or extends it as she feels necessary. This sort of practice was applauded by T. S. Eliot in Reflections on Vers Libre, (1917) where he rejects free verse as a genuine form because it can only be defined in negatives. But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. In Mews poetry, the varying line lengths seem to be dictated by the rhythms of the speaking voice. Mew was very keen on her poetry being read aloud and gave performances of her own work. Mew uses many of the devices that Laforgue uses for ironic effect - repetition, questions, exclamations. In Madeleine in Church, the speaker ironically exclaims, Oh ! I know Virtue , and the Peace it brings! but On The Road To The Sea comes closer to Laforgues bantering tone. Mew told Florence Hardy that this poem represents a middle-aged man speaking, in thought, to a middle-aged woman whom he had only met once or twice and suggested that when it was included in the 1921 edition of The Farmers Bride, it should be preceded by the epigraph, La beaut des jeunes femmes est distribue sur les diverses parties. Quand elles vieillissent, la beaut se fixe sur leur visage. The tone is set in the first stanza with a flippant description of the difficulty of making the woman smile. We passed each other, turned and stopped for half an hour, then went our way, I who make other women smile did not make you But no man can move mountains in a day. So this hard thing is yet to do. Beginning with the striking demand , I want your life, the next three stanzas develop the idea of wanting to know this womans history, to see her walking down the years, light-heartedly creating an imagined past for her. I have brushed your hand and heard The child in you : I like that best In the next stanza the tone becomes more serious, expressing a wish not to distress the woman for whom his desire is now expressed with urgency. But I want your life before mine bleeds away Here not in heavenly hereafters soon, - This is immediately undermined by the flippant, ironic tone of the next three lines I want your smile this very afternoon, (The last of all my vices, pleasant people used to say, I wanted and I sometimes got the Moon !) The mood changes again in the next two stanzas which make a lyrical comparison of death with the closing of the day and peace is represented as my little handful of the gleaners grain. But in the last stanza, with its exclamation and questions, the ironic tone is reinstated, as the poem returns full circle to the intention of the first stanza. Peace ! Would you not rather die Reeling with all the cannons at your ear ? So, at least, would I, And I may not be here To-night, to-morrow morning or next year. Still I will let you keep your life a little while, See dear ? I have made you smile. There are also thematic similarities between Mew and Laforgue. In some poems which read like dramatic monologues (although the genre does not exist in French poetry), Laforgue uses various masks to express a variety of feelings. Identity is an important theme in his poetry and the self is seen as fragmented or multiple. Quand jorganise une descente en Moi, Jen conviens, je trouve l, attable, Une socit un peu bien mle.. (When I decide to drop in on Myself, I must admit I find there, round the table, Quite a mixed company of people.) However, while Laforgues expressions of fragmentation may have had an influence on Mew, she could equally have drawn upon similar expressions in the poetry of Robert Browning. In Sordello, for example, Browning expresses doubts about the possibility of representing a stable subject because language can only show the whole / By parts, the simultaneous and the sole / By the successive and the many. Mew could also have found a multiplicity of conflicting personae in Walt Whitmans poems. Do I contradict myself ? Very well thenI contradict myself; I am largeI contain multitudes. A sense of psychic fragmentation also emerges in Emily Dickinsons work who like Mew used the colour white as an image of poetic creativity. I felt a Cleaving in my Mind As if my Brain had split I tried to match it Seam by Seam But could not make them fit; The thought behind, I strove to join Unto the thought before But Sequence ravelled out of Sound Like Balls upon a Floor. The fragmentation of the self was obviously a theme that crossed national boundaries just as it crossed temporal ones from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Another French influence on Mews work may have been Edouard Dujardins story, Les Lauriers Sont Coups (1888), which is claimed to be the first interior monologue in prose and is said to have had a great influence on James Joyce, who read it in 1901. Dujardin was allied with the symbolist poets and admits to the influence of the psychological novels of Dostoevsky, Brownings dramatic monologues and, like Mew, of Wagners use of the leitmotiv. Another Modernist preoccupation emerges in The Pedlar and A Quoi Bon Dire where dislocations of time and place seem to draw on Bergsons view of time experienced as temporal flow. In a letter to Sydney Cockerell, Mew wrote, Perhaps time is the greatest of all the illusions and in these poems, past, present and future merge into one. In The Pedlar, the speaker suggests that our younger selves still exist as ghosts alongside our older selves. How if we stopped and let our solemn selves go by, While my gay ghost caught and kissed yours, as ghosts