I found it interesting how all of Hemans' poems that we read had something to do with immortalizing the memory of long-deceased woman. I know on Tuesday how we talked about how she, Shelley and Keats we all interested in their own mortality and memory, but that still didn't prepare me for the way her poems seemed to say "Hey, women are awesome and deserve to be revered long after their deaths."
Mostly, I was interested in how--aside from "Woman and Fame"--her poems all seem to be about other women. In fact, the women in "Effigies" and "Lava" don't even have names, but Hemans sought to write about them all the same. By comparison, the works we read by Keats and Shelley (to a lesser extent) we focused on themselves. I wondered what it might be that made Hemans call attention to the memories of these other women. Was it a sort of quid pro quo, where if she wanted her own place in popular memory she should make sure to remember other women?
I also found it interesting that she embraces femininity in the poems. In "Effigies" she unironically calls the woman in the statue "gentle" and praises her presumed devotion to her husband. In "Lava," she gushes about maternal affection. Neither of these seem snide in any way, but rather comign from a deep respect for these "feminine" traits. But perhaps I'm only getting the surface sensations again.
I had noticed that she seemed rather focused on other women, as opposed to herself, in her poetry. While it could be simply that she wanted to remember others, the notes of discontent made me wonder if perhaps it was more that she found it easier to bring some issues to prominence, i.e. the lack of freedom, in other women's lives.
ReplyDeleteReading these poems was actually quite a breath of fresh air compared to Walsingham which often exhibited misogyny within its female characters. Hemans actually seems to celebrate women and the womanly sphere within her poems instead of trying to make feminine traits more masculine.
ReplyDeleteMore than immortalize women, Hemans exposes that women have been negated the privilege of immortality, because the "ages reckon not the tears/Which ceaseless the forsaken woman sheds." (from the epigraph by Goethe). In this sense, women are not as "all" as the men which they physically stand beside. There seems to be a recognition of a spiritual divide (although 'divide' is the wrong word, because it implies that women are as substantial to begin with)... After the man has died, the woman in the poem experiences the feeling of her spirit being far away (line 44) even as she continues to exist... as if the man's death, with his spirit transcended, has taken with him any that she may have had vicariously through him.
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