“this winged nature fraught”: Suicide and Agency in Women's Poetry

This essay focuses on representations of female suicide by Romantic poets Felicia Hemans and Mary Robinson. In short lyric narratives, the two poets exploited themes of maternal, revolutionary, and Sapphic suicide. Their literary representations of women's voluntary death can both draw from and generate narratives of political resistance: the repudiation of slavery, of empire, of tyranny. Female suicide may also invoke discourses about the nature and function of poetic voice, genre, and authorship. Selected fatal moments point toward the political and metapoetic implications of gesture and voice. In the penultimate sonnet of Robinson's Sappho and Phaon, for example, the classical poet—the tenth muse—reflects upon her impending death. Perched on the Leucadian rock, Sappho gazes up at the sky, and not down toward her watery grave;Robinson's imagery suggests soaring flight rather than precipitous fall. Sappho anticipates posthumous fame more triumphant, more transcendent, than that which she achieved in life: then shall “loftier passions prompt the loftier theme!” In this way Sappho's suicidal genius stands in for the neglected genius of Romantic women writers; it figures the self‐reflexive, paradoxical condition of the female writer at once legitimated and effaced by the authorial role. For these authors, the rhetoric and imagery of female suicide does not provide textual closure, nor does it determine, finally, a poem's meaning. Rather, suicide opens up the text.