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Thesis
DEATH IN THE "VINE-HUNG BOWER"
University of West Florida
Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida
2014
Abstract
The vine imagery that pervades Felicia Hemans' Records of Woman hails from traditional devices, such as the poetic bower. While Hemans manipulates bower conventions so that she can speak as both a poet and woman in the male-dominated literary arena, she also combines bower and death conceits to complicate the conflation of national and familial domesticity that drives the patriotic discourse of Romantic era Britain. On the one hand, Records' ubiquitous vine imagery and unrelenting tide of female death and violence suggest a female identity crisis emerging out of the project of expansion that ultimately cripples women's subjectivity and imaginative productivity. On the other hand, Hemans repeatedly uses death as a covert means of social resistance and women's emotional and artistic transcendence. Records' numerous suicides and filicides resist the absorption of female tropes into the patriotic discourse for the perpetuation of patriarchal and imperialistic ideals. Meanwhile, a closer reading of the embowered tombs of the closing poems reveals that the structures of death serve as alternative creative spaces that offer women the affective agency and productivity they normally are denied in popular Romantic discourses that objectify women and exploit their idealized virtuousness in the interest of national representation.
Details
- Title
- DEATH IN THE "VINE-HUNG BOWER"
- Resource Type
- Thesis
- Publisher
- University of West Florida
- Format
- text
- Copyright
- http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/
- Identifiers
- 99380090854006600
- Academic Unit
- English
- Language
- English
- Awarding Institution
- University of West Florida; Master of Arts (MA)
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida