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Charlotte Smith'S Androgynous Sonnets

CHARLOTTE SMITH’S Elegiac Sonnets make for a fascinating study in biographical criticism, and many recent critics have sought to extract a single narrative voice from the sonnets as a series—a voice usually closely associated with the poet’s own life. In doing so, they have tended to ignore the sonnets in which Smith openly adopts a different narrative voice— the Werther sonnets and the sonnets taken from her novels. In these sonnets, Smith explicitly takes on the persona of a male speaker. As Stuart Curran writes, Smith, ‘‘emphasizes again and again that she belongs to a long tradition of singers and that her poems transmit a number of ventriloquized voices’’ (Smith xxvi). However, I want to show that these sonnets are not entirely separate from the rest of Smith’s series and that Smith uses these male speakers as a contrast to the female voice that runs through the rest of her work. That is, when Smith uses a female speaker, she adopts many of the capacities traditionally assigned to the male poet, while her male speakers fail to demonstrate these capacities with the same degree of expertise and competence. Deborah Kennedy notes that, despite Smith’s apparent depression and hopelessness, she does not succumb to despair, suicidal thoughts, or loss of reason. She does not, in short, lose control of her mind. In the Werther sonnets, however, Smith provides a contrast to her usual controlled and stable speaker; and interestingly enough, it is the male speaker who is mentally feeble and who seems to lose his reason. For this reason I disagree with Lorraine Fletcher’s assessment that the Werther sonnets are ‘‘presented without irony’’ due to Smith’s own ‘‘preoccupation with death’’ (52). The irony arises in the explicit comparison Smith makes between Werther’s voice and the female speakers of most of her other sonnets. In Sonnet XXI, ‘‘Supposed to be written by Werter, [sic]’’ Smith explicitly invokes the conventions of erotic love poetry, writing of the ‘‘burning arrows’’ of Love, and becoming ‘‘Passion’s helpless slave’’ (14). Significantly, Smith chooses to distance herself twice from the poem’s most erotic line, once by adopting the voice of Werther, and doing so by quoting another male poet, Alexander Pope, from whom she lifts the line ‘‘And drink delicious poison from her eyes!’’ (8). Clearly, Smith is willing to attribute some sentiments to a male speaker that she is not willing to attribute to herself. In the final lines of the poem, the speaker compares himself to an insect irresistibly drawn to a flame: ‘‘So round the flame the giddy insect flies,=And courts the fatal fire by which it dies’’ (13–14).