“Thou Thing of Years Departed”: (En)Gendering Posthumous Sublimity in Felicia Hemans's “The Image in Lava”

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Notes

¹This article has benefited from dialogue with and comments received by Adela Pinch, Yopie Prins, John Kucich, Isobel Armstrong, and Noah Comet. My thanks also go to participants of panels at the 2002 Northeast Victorian Studies Association meeting (“Victorian Origins and Excavations”) and the 2005 British Association of Romantic Studies conference (“Romanticism's Debatable Lands”), who also offered valuable feedback.

²For the impact of Vesuvius's eruption on nineteenth-century literature, see Goldstein, Leppmann, and Reinhold.

³The translation is mine; the original French reads, “ce brusque saut de dix-neuf siécles.”

⁴As editor Paula Feldman notes, Hemans later changed the location of the image to Herculaneum. However, only nine skeletons had been recovered from beneath the fifty feet of congealed lava and volcanic mud at Herculaneum by the early nineteenth century, and none of their descriptions match that of the image Hemans takes as her subject. Hemans's image does correspond to an archaeological discovery made near the Herculaneum Gate 15 years prior to the poem's publication: “on 12^th May, 1812, again in the Street of Tombs, and not far from the so-called villa of Diomedes, the skeleton of a young woman had been found, wearing the most splendid rings and charming ear-rings decorated with pearls. She had pressed her child to her breast; not far away two young girls were lying” (Corti 170). It is possible Hemans confused the skeletons' location near the Herculaneum Gate in Pompeii for the nearby town of the same name. Hemans may have come across the description of the image in the archaeological findings recorded by geologist Sir William Gell in his popular Pompeiana: The Topography, Edifices and Ornaments of Pompeii (1819).

⁵Comparisons between ancient Pompeii's and modern London's domestic affairs are not unique to Hemans's poem. See, for instance, Madame Wolfensberger's remark upon seeing households and the tools and utensils of daily life from Pompeii in the Naples Museum: “Nothing can make us feel so strongly that they were men and women like ourselves” (86).

⁶Tricia Lootens has argued that “The Image in Lava” is “a particularly powerful example of Hemans's feminine anti-war writing” (14), and Grant Scott hesitantly suggests that it is an “anti-monument poem” (50). Both readings substantiate claims that Hemans is critiquing the masculinized powers of empire and martial law.

⁷Critics have often pointed to Hemans's biography as one rationale for this recurring trope of the husband and father who abandons his wife and family: early in her life, her own father had defected from England to Quebec, leaving behind her mother with six children and considerable financial obligations; in 1818, Hemans's own husband of six years would travel to Rome just prior to the birth of their fifth son, never to return—though some have speculated whether this desertion did not ultimately benefit Hemans by spurring on her career (Leighton 9–10; Osman, pars. 6–7).

⁸Considering that Hemans had both read Corinne (1807) and composed her own poem about its mythical protagonist (“Corinne at the Capitol” [1830]), it is not surprising that Hemans's intimation of the fragility of love being imprinted on the dust echoes imagery in Germaine de Staël's chapter on Pompeii, in which the narrator observes, “But as you pass by those ashes which art manages to bring back to life, you are afraid to breathe, in case a breath carries away the dust perhaps still imprinted with noble ideas” (199). See Wolfson xxiv–xxvi for more on Hemans's revision of the figure of Corinne and the poet's connection to de Staël. Hemans's poem may also be a rejoinder to Lord Byron's “To Woman” (1806), an ode describing the caprices of a woman's love: “This record will for ever stand,/ ‘Woman, thy vows are traced in sand’” (21–22).

⁹For instance, Kathleen Lundeen suggests that Hemans perceived in the image “the prophetic message … that when a patriarchal civilization has come to an end, a civilization friendly to womankind will emerge” (par. 4). Lundeen goes on to argue that “[b]y asserting her maternal instinct, the mother redefines femininity as courage, determination, and fearlessness,” thereby allowing “Hemans's female characters [to] attain a moral victory over patriarchal domination through what could be described as hyper-domesticity” (par. 6).

¹⁰Cf. Leighton 16–17.

¹¹Similarly, in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's bestselling The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), which Hemans commended for its “profound emotion” and “abyss of passion” (V. Bulwer-Lytton 445), the corporeal remains of the woman and child did not necessarily form a monument to maternal affection. Bulwer imagines that the mother's “ominous voice had been raised so often and so gladly in anticipation” of bloody, violent gladiatorial shows and Christian executions in the amphitheatre (395), and her repentant pleas at the door of Diomedes reveal that she has been an absent mother, acknowledging her child only in the last hour before her death: “‘See,’—pointing to an infant clasped to her breast,—‘see this little one!—it is mine!—the child of shame! I have never owned it till this hour. But now I remember I am a mother!’” (396). In Bulwer-Lytton's moralizing tale, the woman and child's demise serves as punishment for the mother's degenerate behavior, epitomized by her strident bloodlust, the illegitimacy of her baby, and her desertion of the child throughout its infancy—a seeming conflation of the abandoned mother and neglectful father in Hemans's poem.

¹²“[L]ignes ondulées et voluptueuses comme des hanches de femme” (22).

¹³These suicides included an “unhappy Frenchman” armed with gunpowder (“Mount Vesuvius” 346), an Italian peasant unwilling to watch the destruction of his property by another lava flow (“Vesuvius” 7), a British aristocrat unable to cope with unrequited love (“Death of Lord Shelburne” 2), and the titular character from the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1845–1847).

¹⁴I have taken the term “current” from an article by Christopher Coates: his “Exhumation and Anachronism” examines Walter Pater's imaginary portrait of “Duke Carl of Rosenmold,” in which the eponymous figure's corpse is unexpectedly exhumed during a storm and is confronted by local villagers. Coates argues that in this scenario, “the fact that the Duke's [hi]story has been unresolved for so long, and is therefore perpetually ‘current,’ keeps this imagined similarity dynamic and viable” (100, emphasis added).

¹⁵As Victorian philologist Walter William Skeat defines it, posthumous means “born after the father's death” or “published after the author's decease.” Relevant to my interpretation of the word is the “popular etymology” that spelled the word as posthumus, “as if derived from [the Latin] post humum, lit[erally] after the ground, which was forced into the meaning ‘after the father is laid in the ground or buried;’ and, in accordance with this notion, the sense of the word was at last chiefly confined to such usage” (Skeat 459). In this sense, the term “posthumous” suggests both temporal (post, “after”) and spatial (humum, “ground”) dimensions that elicit uncanny effects because of their association with death.

¹⁶See, for instance, Armstrong, “Msrepresentation.”

¹⁷Cf. Johnson 223.

¹⁸Several archaeologists and press reporters questioned whether the homes, buildings, artifacts, and human remnants (both skeletons and plaster casts) of Pompeii's victims would survive beyond their current spectators' lifetimes because of improper care and exposure to sunlight during excavation (Wolfensberger 87, “Latest” 474, and “Excavations” 7).

¹⁹Scott describes how Hemans “depicts a decidedly natural image … shaped by no human sculptor, but by the catastrophic hand of nature” (49), which is why “the creative mind of the artist … and the process of creation” that are often depicted in Romantic ekphrasis are missing from “The Image in Lava” (Simonsen 327).