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ABSTRACT
Mary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales (1800), as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging “romantic” mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that “cheekiness,” I argue, stems from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying, haunting, and even tormenting the speakers and the subject-matter in the original Lyrical Ballads.
Notes
1. Langbaum, Poetry of Experience, 9–13, 17.
2. Langbaum, Mysteries of Identity, 36–38, 31.
3. See Luther, “A Stranger Minstrel,” 391–99.
4. See Curran, “Robinson’s Lyrical Tales,” 19–20.
5. See Curran, “Robinson’s Lyrical Tales”; Cross, “From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales”; Labbe, “Deflected Violence”; and Bolton, “Romancing the Stone,” 740–48.
6. Curran, “Robinson’s Lyrical Tales,” 23–26.
7. Ibid., 27–29.
8. Cross, “From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales,” 595.
9. Coleridge’s words in “The Dungeon” (1798), lines 29–30, in Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 114.
10. Bolton, “Romancing the Stone,” 743–48 (emphasis added).
11. Ibid., 741.
12. Coleridge, “Review of The Monk,” Critical Review 19 (February 1797), in Clery and Miles, Gothic Documents, 187.
13. Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 175–77.
14. See Hogle, “The Gothic-Romantic Nexus,” 159–61. Line references to all poems in this essay are cited parenthetically in the text.
15. Brewer, “The French Revolution,” 115–18.
16. All citations from the Lyrical Tales in this essay refer, with line numbers, to Robinson, Selected Poems, 182–288.
17. Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 100–102.
18. All citations are from Walpole, Castle of Otranto.
19. See Williams, “Monstrous Pleasures.”
20. See Fiedler, Love and Death, 131–34.
21. Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 81–89.
22. Lyotard, The Differend, ix.
23. Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 178.
24. Mellor, “Mary Robinson,” 250.
25. All my citations from this novel, with volume and page numbers, are from Robinson, Hubert de Sevrac.
26. Brewer, “The French Revolution,” 118. See also Close, “Notorious,” 175–80, and Setzer, “The Gothic Structure.”
27. All citations from these Memoirs come from the 1802 two-volume edition of Robinson, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson.
28. See Burke, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757),” in Clery and Miles, Gothic Documents, 120–21.
29. Coleridge and Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 118–32.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jerrold E. Hogle
Jerrold E. Hogle, whose Ph.D. is from Harvard, is Professor Emeritus of English and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona, USA. The winner of Guggenheim, Mellon, and other major fellowships for research, and of the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Keats-Shelley Association of America, he has published widely on English Romantic writing, literary and cultural theory, and the Gothic. His books include, among others, Shelley’s Process (Oxford), The “Undergrounds” of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ (Palgrave), and both The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction and The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic from the Cambridge University Press.