Blurring Boundaries: Madness and Desire in Charlotte Mew’s Poems

Abstract

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) is a woman poet who was praised by her contemporary writers but almost forgotten to the public until she was revived in the 1980s. By focusing on Mew’s presentation of madness, this paper tries to reveal the significance of Mew’s attempt to unsettle the deep association between madness and women as well as the division of madness and reason. Mew’s questioning of the traditional understanding of madness enables the reader to see the paradoxes of confinement and liberation and thus the absurdity of the border line between the sane and insane, and between reason and madness. Mew’s deconstruction of socially imposed values between sane/insane, male/female, and good/evil leads to her complicated presentation of sexual desire. The second section pays attention to the way in which the poet’s perspective on trespassing fixed boundaries of her society inscribes the issues of sexual desire and madness in her poems. The third section examines how Mew’s unsettling of traditional ideas of desire and madness makes possible the creation of liberating space for her poetic imagination.