Copies, Protean Role-Players, and Sappho's Shattered Form in Mary Robinson's The False Friend
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10509585.2011.615993
ISSN1740-4657
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoAbstract According to the eighteenth-century writer Edward Young, we are all born originals, but apelike imitation soon destroys our "mental Individuality" and reduces us to copies. Mary Robinson explores Young's original/copy dichotomy in several of her works, and she often portrays the figure of the imitative self as conflicted and unnatural. Gertrude St. Leger, the protagonist of Robinson's epistolary novel The False Friend (1799), becomes an eighteenth-century copy of the heartbroken and suicidal Sappho of Ovid's Heroides and compulsively reenacts her mother's tragic life. Protean characters like the villainous Mr Treville become consumed by the parts they perform and at moments of crisis are forced to confront their inner emptiness and lack of authenticity. In The False Friend, Robinson suggests that in order for individuals to retain at least some control over their lives and avert despair, they must develop selfhoods strong enough to resist the pressure of social conformity and the manipulations of chameleonic tricksters. The novel's most viably authentic character is Miss Stanley, whose imitativeness is tempered by an enlightened contrarianism and a refusal to be dominated by others. Notes John Hope Mason notes that "The importance of Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), in France and Germany as well as in Britain, is generally recognized" (37). Mary Robinson admired Young and used five passages from his poetry as chapter epigraphs in her novel Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance, of the Eighteenth Century (1796). Young is also mentioned in her novel Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature (1797) (230). The original/copy binary is also an important issue in Robinson's poetry. Ashley J. Cross persuasively argues that Robinson's Lyrical Tales (1800) is "a revisionary response to Lyrical Ballads (1798)" that "radically destabilizes the relationship between original and copy, self and other" ("From Lyrical Ballads to Lyrical Tales" 574, 593). Contemporary readers identified Treville as a surrogate for Robinson's former lover Banastre Tarleton, who announced his engagement to the illegitimate heiress Susan Priscilla Bertie a couple of months before the novel's publication. Hester Davenport writes, however, that "Treville represents more than Tarleton. In 1798 Mary was writing not just The False Friend but her Memoirs and, consciously or unconsciously, Treville is surely a composite of all those libertines who aimed at or succeeded in charming her into their beds, from Lord Lyttelton onwards" (202). Paula Byrne contends that "the character of Treville is actually more a literary type than a portrait of Tarleton. He is a rake in the mold of Lovelace in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa" (342). In fact, Gertrude makes an explicit comparison between Lovelace and Treville (2.172). The phrase "pupil of nature" is also used to describe the title-character of Walsingham; in The False Friend, Gertrude regards the impulsive Edward Ashgrove as a "child of nature" (3.90). Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the term polygraph in a letter to Robert Southey. Referring to his sonnet "To R. B. Sheridan Esq. –, " Coleridge writes that "The mode of bepraising a man by enumerating the beauties of his Polygraph is at least an original one" (1.141). For a discussion of polygraphs in Walsingham, see Brewer 17–26. As the impersonator of a virtuous cleric, Treville recalls Lady ——, the protean heroine of Eliza Haywood's Fantomina: Or, Love in a Maze (1724) who takes on the roles of a number of stock characters (the "Town-Mistress," the "rude Country Girl," and the bereaved widow) to retain the affections of her lover (3.260, 3.270). Lady —— differs, however, from Treville in her constancy to her beloved. Regarding Hemans's response to Sappho, see Ross 298–99; for a discussion of Landon and Sappho, see Prins 191–200. According to Linda H. Peterson, "Sappho represents, for Robinson and other woman poets, an ancient, original, and originating figure who fulfills the criteria for Romantic artistry yet adds specifically female features to the myths of becoming a poet" (41). Curran 20–21; Robinson is referred to as "our British Sappho" in a December 1796 review of her Sappho and Phaon in the English Review (Selected Poems 385). According to Gill Perry, a painting entitled The British Sappho by Robinson's friend Angelica Kauffman, a famous Swiss artist, is a portrait of the poet (44). In Jerome McGann's discussion of Sappho and Phaon, he argues that Robinson considers herself as "the avatar of Sappho," seeking to redeem "man," as Sappho attempts to redeem her benighted lover Phaon, through "poesy" (114; Sappho and Phaon I.9–10). In her memoirs, Robinson suggests that she learned Latin, French, and Italian from her teacher Meribah Lorrington but does not claim to have acquired even the rudiments of ancient Greek (see Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson 29). Margaret Reynolds blames Pope for turning the name "Sappho" into a code word for a "lewd and infamous Creature" (124–25). There is at least one disrespectful reference to Sappho in Robinson's writings: the narrator of The Natural Daughter condemns the licentious and villainous Julia Bradford for her ability to "make love like Sappho" (124). See Ovid's Epistvla Sapphvs ad Phaonem, 15–20: "nec me Pyrrhiades Methymniadesue puellae, / nec me Lesbiadum cetera turba iuuant. / uilis Anactorie, uilis, mihi crede, Gyrinno, / non oculis grata est Atthis, ut ante, meis, / atque aliae centum, quas non sine crimine amaui. / improbe, multarum quod fuit, unus habes" (Heroides: Selected Epistles 78), translated by Harold Isbell as "No Pyrrhan girls please me now, nor do those from / Methymna, nor any from Lesbos. / Anactoria is nothing to me now, / nor is that dazzling beauty, Cydro. / Atthis no longer brings joy to my eyes as / she did once. Nor do I find pleasure / in the hundred others I have loved in shame" (Heroides 134). Pope downplays this passage by reducing it to two lines: "No more the Lesbian Dames my Passion move, / Once the dear Objects of my guilty Love" (Sapho to Phaon, lines 17–18). Robinson also cites Barthélemy's account of Sappho in her A Letter to the Women of England (1799): "Some anecdotes of this celebrated woman, who lived near 600 years before Christ, may be found in the Abbé Barthelimi's [sic] Travels of Anacharsis the Younger" (59). Epistvla Sapphvs ad Phaonem, lines 117–22, Sapho to Phaon, lines 135–42. Pope has "Sapho" express her unhappiness as a parent: "An Infant Daughter late my Griefs increast [sic] / And all a Mother's Cares distract my Breast" (lines 77–78). No daughter is mentioned in Robinson's Sappho and Phaon. Selected Poems 153–54; Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson 28–30. Although Denmore states that Sappho "was not famed for personal attractions," the bust is modeled on a beautiful woman who resembles the lovely Gertrude. This inconsistency is not explained in the novel. For the definitive edition of this poem in its original Greek, see Lobel and Page 32. Joseph Addison's Spectator essays on Sappho, to which Robinson alludes in her "Account of Sappho" (Selected Poems 152), contain English translations by Addison's friend Ambrose Philips of Sappho's two most famous fragments (2.367–369, 2.392). Gertrude may have access to the Spectator essays in Lord Denmore's extensive library. See Addison 2.366. See Robinson's extract from Barthélemy in her "Account of Sappho": "The sensibility of Sappho was extreme! she loved Phaon, who forsook her; after various efforts to bring him back, she took the leap of Leucata, and perished in the waves!" (Selected Poems 154). Cross writes that Miss Stanley "is the substitute mother" who "comes too late to save [Gertrude]" ("He-She Philosophers and Other Literary Bugbears" 61). Sharon Setzer explains in her edition of A Letter to the Women of England that "Publishing poems under the pseudonym of 'Laura,' Robinson wrote herself onto the Petrarchan tradition even as she wrote against it [in A Letter]" (A Letter to the Women of England 71n. 2). Godwin 242. Since The False Friend was published in February 1799, it is likely that Robinson read Memoirs of the Author of "The Rights of Woman" as she composed her novel.
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