Abstract: “Counter-Daemonic: Subversion of Values in L.E.L.’s Literary Annual Fairies”
Writing for a living, Letitia Landon found her main source of income and expressive channel for her poetry in the commercialized form of the literary annuals. Often expensive, extravagantly engraved and luxuriously crafted, these works came to dominate a considerable part of the literary market, exemplifying not only the economic value of poetry but also the gender politics involved in it. Often the only way for women writers to publish their works, literary annuals presented both restriction and opportunity: while dependent on the male-dominated publishing field, their value and popularity increased even to threaten established male writers (see Feldman 2006), countering the ‘Romantic ideology’ (McGann 1983) that tries to distance aesthetic preoccupation from economic value and instead focus on the non-economic worth of literature. Throughout Landon’s works, the commodification of literature was an unknowing patron of the arts. The subversion of poetic/economic values inherent to her writing is often reflected in her work – as a Romantic persona that apparently adheres to publishers’ and readers’ expectations but simultaneously eludes them (see Stephenson 1992), but also in her revision of a classic Romantic theme: the Daemonic. Often, a daemonic connotation is attached to the figures of female ‘temptresses’ that populate Romantic poetry, ‘femmes fatales’ (see Craciun 2002; Rummel 2008) in which the sublime, usually gendered male, takes on a feminine incarnation only to condemn its figures to the role of seductive daemons – see Keats’s Belle Dame and Lamia. Interestingly, however, the daemonic has also been used by women writers to reclaim their “poetic identity and ambition” as “outcast genius[es]” (Craciun 2003: 700). Reclaimed by Landon, a counter-daemonic femininity becomes amoral in its sublimity. The ekphrastic poem “Fairies on the Sea Shore” from The Troubadour embodies a counter-daemonic through fairies that evoke leprechauns, snakes and temptations while simply rejoicing in their songs. Embedded in the matter of the fairies’ dwellings, the poem conveys the material sublime (see McCosh) of the painting it reproduces through the materiality of its protagonists. Similarly, “Fairy of the Fountain”, read as an antithesis to Lamia – the “license” (Landon 1825: 57) Landon takes in altering her source texts effectively absolving the serpentine Melusine and depicting her as a victim of double betrayal – expresses a counterdaemonicitythrough materiality, so that Melusine’s descent from princess to monster mimics the passage from living to non-living matter, allowing her ineffable, amoral sublimity to enter the poem. Thus, a sort of “feminist romantic Satanism” (Craciun 2003: 700) can be uncovered in Landon’ fairies as a daemonic, but not daemonized, sublime instances that lyrically enact the subversive value of her writing.
Works Cited
Craciun, Adriana. 2003. “Romantic Satanism and the Rise of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry.” New Literary History 34. 4: 699–721.
Feldman, Paula R. 2006. “Women, Literary Annuals, and the Evidence of Inscriptions.” Keats-Shelley Journal 55: 54–62.
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth. 1835. “The Fairy of the Fountains.” In Fisher’s Drawing Room
Scrapbook, edited by H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 57–64. Toronto: Thomas Fisher Library.
McCosh, Liza. 2013. “The Sublime: Process and Mediation.” In Carnal Knowledge: Towards
a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 127–138. London: I.B. Tauris.
McGann, Jerome J. 1983. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Rummel, Andrea. 2008. “Delusive Beauty”: femmes fatales in English Romanticism. Bonn: Bonn University Press.
Stephenson, Glennis. 1992. “Letitia Landon and the Victorian Improvisatrice: The Construction of L.E.L.” Victorian Poetry 30.1: 1–17.
Bio: University of Augsburg, Germany
Irene Valenti holds an M.A. in English and American Studies from the University of Augsburg with a thesis on sublime affects in the poetry of Shelley and Keats. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Augsburg with a dissertation project entitled Daemonic Matter: The Material Sublime in Romantic Poetry, which seeks to expand theories of the sublime from a new materialist perspective.