Abstract: “Measures of Value: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and the Axiology of Poetic Genre”
The form and genre of the sonnet is inherently connected to the discourse of value. In the English Renaissance, the Petrarchan tradition of the blazon introduces the idea of economic value and exchange to the poetic mode of praise. As Patricia Parker (1995) has shown, the fragmentation and itemization of a woman’s beauty features resembles the form of an inventory and thus submits the female body simultaneously to an economic appraisal and an objectifying devaluation. Similarly, the English sub-genre of the accounting sonnet uses metaphors and formal elements from the micro-economic technique of double-entry bookkeeping to conceptualize more abstract ethical concepts of value, such as the value of a life dedicated to love and poetic creation (Bethke 2021). By sharing formal features with the double entry-ledger, and thanks to their general numerological structure, early modern sonnets become literary calculation machines that are variously used to reckon the value of either the female addressee or the speaker’s life and poetic output.
This paper assumes a diachronic perspective on the English sonnet tradition and explores if and how the value-related features of the sonnet genre are continued in the late eighteenth century. Casting its main focus on Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784, 1786, 1789, 1792, 1796, 1797, 1800), it argues that in the Romantic age the sonnet form continues to function as a medium for the negotiation of value on various levels. Firstly, the Romantic sonnet revival was predominantly advanced by female writers like Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, and Mary Robinson. According to Daniel Robinson, romantic “women writers deliberately claimed” the sonnet form “in order to legitimize themselves as poets” (3), thus exposing the axiological dimension of poetic genre: while male poets of the period produced singular sonnets as well, they had the liberty to deconstruct and re-invent the form, thus adhering to new aesthetic ideals of originality and radical subjectivity. Women, on the other hand, needed to demonstrate mastery of traditional genres. The Romantic sonnet thus points to gendered aesthetic value systems. Secondly, the case of Charlotte Smith puts in an interesting tension the dimensions of aesthetic and economic value. The popular success of her collection, which came out in ever new and expanded editions over sixteen years, corresponded with an economic success she desperately needed to make a living (cf. Henderson 51). Thirdly, and most importantly, Charlotte Smith uses her sonnet collection (both poems and paratexts), to perpetuate a singular personal complaint that will persist for decades, namely her struggle to free up her children’s inheritance from the father of her abusive husband, a sum to which she, as a woman, could have no claim in the first place (cf. Rostek). Using a new formalist perspective, this paper proposes to investigate the way aesthetic and economic value systems shape the form of Charlotte Smith’s famous sonnet sequence, and how, conversely, her sonnets become instances of measuring and negotiating the value of gender and genre.
Bethke, Kathrin. “Love’s Accountants: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Sonnet Form in Early Modern England”. In Forms at Work: New Formalist Approaches to the Study of Literature, Culture, and Media, edited by Ansgar Nünning et al., 25–40. Trier: WTV, 2021.
Henderson, Diana E. “The Sonnet, Subjectivity, and Gender”. In The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, edited by Peter Howarth and A.D. Cousins, 46–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Parker, Patricia. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. London, New York: Methuen, 1987.
Robinson, Daniel. “Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet Claim”. European Romantic Review 6, no. 1 (1995): 98–127.
Rostek, Joanna. Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age: Towards a Transdisciplinary Herstory of Economic Thought. Routledge IAFFE Advances in Feminist Economics. London, New York: Routledge, 2021.
Smith, Charlotte. “Elegiac Sonnets”. In The Works of Charlotte Smith, edited by Jaqueline M. Labbe, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007.
Bio: FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
Kathrin Bethke is Associate Professor (Akademische Rätin auf Zeit) at the Department of Englisch and American Studies of the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. She holds a PhD in English from the Free University of Berlin and an MA in Comparative Literature from the same university. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled “Affective Appraisals: Shakespearean Correlations of Emotions and the Concepts of Value” and investigates the axiological dimension of emotions and other affective phenomena as they are represented in Shakespeare’s poems and plays. Her current research is dedicated to elements of a transcultural poetics in contemporary diasporic literatures in English. Kathrin Bethke has taught English and Comparative Literature at Kiel University, Goettingen University as well as the Free University of Berlin. She has held scholarships from the Fulbright Commission, the DRS (Dahlem Research School) and the DAAD for research stays at Yale University, Stanford University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.