Literary Hybridity and the Aesthetic of Suffering and Desire in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets
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Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784) marked a turning point in the revival of the sonnet in the late eighteenth century. Returning to the formal and stylistic characteristics of the sonnet that she adapts from the Italian sonnet’s medieval originator, Petrarch, Smith blends aesthetic and formal features of the elegy with the sonnet in her works. Sonnets typically feature feminine figures of desire causing frustration, even depression, for the poet-lover; the bleaker emotions expressed by sonneteers in their works cohere with the melancholic tones of the elegy, a poetic form commemorating the dead. Both sonnets and elegies deal with pain and loss, and Smith heightens the feelings between the speaker and muse, especially in the sonnets she adapts from Petrarch. Smith’s revival of the sonnet form allowed her to explore the darker moods, tones, and tensions of frustrated same-sex desire. Smith’s literary hybridity in the Elegiac Sonnets advances her aesthetic of suffering, which influenced her choice of these forms. Smith wanted, above all, to establish a new discourse focused on pain: suffering as art. This article considers the aesthetic of suffering in Smith’s treatment of same-sex desire in the new hybrid form.
Abstract
Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784) marked a turning point in the revival of the sonnet in the late eighteenth century. Returning to the formal and stylistic characteristics of the sonnet that she adapts from the Italian sonnet’s medieval originator, Petrarch, Smith blends aesthetic and formal features of the elegy with the sonnet in her works. Sonnets typically feature feminine figures of desire causing frustration, even depression, for the poet-lover; the bleaker emotions expressed by sonneteers in their works cohere with the melancholic tones of the elegy, a poetic form commemorating the dead. Both sonnets and elegies deal with pain and loss, and Smith heightens the feelings between the speaker and muse, especially in the sonnets she adapts from Petrarch. Smith’s revival of the sonnet form allowed her to explore the darker moods, tones, and tensions of frustrated same-sex desire. Smith’s literary hybridity in the Elegiac Sonnets advances her aesthetic of suffering, which influenced her choice of these forms. Smith wanted, above all, to establish a new discourse focused on pain: suffering as art. This article considers the aesthetic of suffering in Smith’s treatment of same-sex desire in the new hybrid form.
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