The cambridge companion to british roman 187

Romantic poetry, sexuality, gender objectification of and desire for Eros is recounted in ornate Spenserian stanzas, foregrounding the poetic and philosophical conventions of desire for which women are typically the object, not the subject According to Harriet Kramer Linkin, Tighe “reclaims the gaze for women’s poetry through her representation of reciprocal objectification,” and does this “before the second generation of masculinist Romantic poets anxiously examine comparable issues.”22 Tighe was not alone in questioning the sexual politics of Romantic vision in her poetry – her contemporaries had also made the relationship of active sexual desire and poetic vision central in such early works as Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796), Dacre’s “The Mistress to the Spirit of Her Lover” (1805), and Bannerman’s “The Dark Ladie” (1802) Like Psyche, these poems reverse the prevailing poetic dynamic of desiring male subject and desired female object Robinson, like Tighe, did this by eroticizing the Sapphic poet’s gaze over the passive body of her male lover, as in “Sonnet X: Describes Phaon”: Oft o’er that form, enamour’d have I hung, On that smooth cheek to mark the deep’ning dyes, While from that lip the fragrant breath would rise, That lip, like Cupid’s bow with rubies strung! Still let me gaze upon that polish’d brow, O’er which the golden hair luxuriant plays.23 While some read the absence of female–female desire in Sappho and Phaon as a sign of Robinson’s reluctance to associate her poetic ideal with a forbidden sexuality, Jerome McGann instead reads the poem as a prophetic manifesto of “‘a woman speaking to women’” about the possibility of an enlightened sexuality.24 As well as being the origin and end of the poetess identity, “Sappho” in the Romantic period could signify active female desire across a broad spectrum: from female–female desire (including pornographic uses), to revolutionary forms of ostensibly heteronormative desire for an allegorical Phaon, to increasingly politicized visions of Sappho’s role inspiring other women, as in Catherine Grace Godwin’s Sappho of 1824, wherein Phaon is wholly absent Active female desire, enacted through the woman’s gaze, links Robinson’s Sappho, Dacre’s Mistress, Tighe’s Psyche, and Bannerman’s Dark Ladie The work of Dacre, Bannerman, and Robinson shared a further connection via their embrace of Gothic, which in part accounts for their foregrounding of how poetic vision is gendered, and compels us to consider Romantic and Gothic traditions together Like the better-known poems of Tighe and Robinson, Bannerman’s Gothic ballad “The Dark Ladie” problematizes the specularization of desire that is central to the male poetic identities 165 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008