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The Dramatic Monologues of Mathilde
Blind
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Undervalued
Acumen: The Dramatic Monologues of Mathilde Blind
By Liz Owens
Part I: Biography
Born in Manheim in 1841, Mathilde Cohen's unconventional beginnings
laid the foundation for her extraordinary, impassioned life.
Her widowed mother, Friederike Ettlinger, joined the political
movement for German democracy and unity in 1847, and was imprisoned
in Durkheim for disseminating a "treasonable" document
with fellow revolutionary and future husband Karl Blind, from
whom Mathilde later adopted her surname (Diedrick 363; Vallance).
After participating in the Baden insurrections in 1848, the
elder Blind was incarcerated. A year later, he married Mathilde's
mother, and due to his radical activism was exiled from Germany,
obliging his new wife and child to move with him to France and
then Belgium (from both of which he was similarly expelled).
The family finally settled in St. John's Wood, England, where
Karl Blind gradually gained a reputation as an accomplished
author, focusing primarily on German folklore, literature, and
history (Diedrick 363; "Blind, Karl").
Young Mathilde's childhood was spent in the company of Europe's
most famous political radicals and intelligentsia. This early
and continual exposure to new and often subversive ideas had
a significant influence on her beliefs; as a teenager, she was
expelled from St. John's School for Girls as a result of her
open and unapologetic atheism. In her adulthood, she continued
to be fiercely independent in her views, championing the cause
of women's rights and advocating equality of opportunity and
education regardless of gender (Diedrick 363-4).
During her twenties, Blind sharpened her writing abilities,
studying and using the masculine voice in her work, and also
writing extensively about male writers. As Diedrick suggests,
these choices were likely a result of "her advanced views
on gender". Yet ironically, it was only through winning
"the admiration of influential male artists and writers",
such as William Michael Rosetti, Richard Garnett, and Ford Madox
Brown, that she was able to achieve publication and gain acceptance
in the literary world. Her first published work was published
in 1867 under the male pseudonym Claude Lake (364).
Forming allegiances with these male intellectuals was critical
to Blind's literary acceptance. Her exchanges with Algernon
Swinburne further developed the sense of aestheticism that informs
her works, and his statements on "adult art" being
solely the purview of men were one likely impetus for her decision
to tackle the subject of female sexual desire in her poem "The
Song of the Willi", published in The Dark Blue in 1871.
By the time she published Dramas in Miniature in 1891, she was
widely respected as an accomplished writer, having published
not only her four volumes of poetry, but also numerous critical
and biographical works (Diedrick 373-374).
Blind's status as an intellectual afforded her the opportunity
to mentor younger, likeminded female poets; she held and frequently
attended women's literary salons in which other daring, progressive
artists could support and encourage each other. Blind and her
colleagues frequently called for increased educational opportunities
for women, and fervently criticized the Victorian institutions
of Christianity and marriage, as well as the practices of imperialism.
Her final works reflected the discussions that took place in
these salons, exploring themes of antitheism, patriarchy, and
sexual libertinism (Diedrick 375). As an appropriate final act,
Mathilde Blind bequeathed her estate to Newnham College, a women's
university in Cambridge (Robinson 2).
Part II: Canonical Status (or lack therof)
Few books have been written exclusively about Mathilde Blind;
and as Diedrick points out, many of the books that do exist
contain misconstructions of both the scope of her abilities
and the gravity of the topics she chose to address. Early
reviews anticipated her omission from the literary canon,
as male critics' uneasiness with her subject matter - which
included extramarital affairs and female sexuality -- frequently
prevented them from taking her poems seriously. "This
form of condescension was common among Blind's male acquaintances,"
Diedrick writes. In a memoir written for The Poetical Works
of Mathilde Blind (published in 1900), her literary advisor
Richard Garnett "helped entomb her reputation for much
of the twentieth century" (359-360). In Garnett's words,
her poems "are far from expressing the entire force and
depth of her nature," and demonstrate an "inattention
to external polish and finish". (qtd. in Diedrick 360).
The first published collections of Blind's poetry solidified
this exclusion. Arthur Symons, a critic who frequently retreated
to "a generalization equating female creativity with
artlessness - a generalization designed to reassure many male
writers during the gender troubles of the 1890s" and
was later named as her literary executor, omitted all of Blind's
dramatic monologues in his 1897 publication of A Selection
from the Poems of Mathilde Blind (Diedrick 360).
Blind was widely reviewed in many Victorian journals, and
was also included in major anthologies in the 1880s and 90s,
including The Poets and the Poetry of the Century (1892),
Sonnets of Three Centuries: A Selection (1882), and several
women's anthologies (Diedrick 379).
Today, her work is rarely published in anthologies outside
of the realm of Victorian women writers and poets. Given her
political and social activism, her works are, not surprisingly,
usually approached from a feminist perspective. Yet Catherine
Reilly's Winged Words: An Anthology of Victorian Women's Poetry
and Verse (1994) contains only three works by Blind: "Manchester
by Night", "Love in Exile", and "Apple-Blossom".
Indeed, it seems that Blind was given much more attention
(albeit condescending) by her contemporaries than by modern-day
scholars. There are no recent books exclusively dedicated
to her life and works, and only a few articles (usually written
for the journal of Victorian Poetry).
Part III: Close Reading of "The Russian Student's
Tale"
"The Russian Student's Tale" was published in Dramas
in Miniature in 1891. In the poem, the speaker is a male student
who abandons his young lover and his promises of eternal devotion
after she reveals that she had been forced into prostitution
earlier in life due to poverty. Interestingly, Blind takes
on the speaker's persona, and indirectly exposes his true
nature.
In the seventh stanza, Diedrick notes that "the language
of his narrative betrays his sexual opportunism and his all-too-eager
indulgence in the pathetic fallacy":
Awake amid the slumberous land,
I told her all my love that night-
How I had loved her at first sight;
How I was hers, and seemed to be
Her own to all eternity. (55-59)
The choice of the word "seemed" is significant,
in that it distances the speaker from the reader and "invites
the reader to treat the speaker's Keatsian vision skeptically"
(Diedrick 362-363). Additionally, his perception of idealized
femininity as the "face of a little child / For innocent
sweetness undefiled" is exposed as unrealistic and impractical,
since it does not take into account the actual economic conditions
and lack of resources that might lead such a woman to see
prostitution as her only option. While he recognizes that
"we all - yes, all / Had helped to hurry her fall",
and wonders whether he has the right to "sit in judgment
on her life", he is unwilling to surmount the societal
barriers that now separate him from her past (112-113; 109).
Other devices in this dramatic monologue encourage readers
to sympathize with the young woman, who is honest with her
lover despite her shame. The speaker realizes the dangers
to which she must have been exposed as "a creature of
the common mart":
A weary seamstress, half a child,
Left unprotected in the street,
Where, when so hungry, you would meet
All sorts of tempters that beguiled.
Oh, infamous and senseless clods,
Basely to taint so pure a heart (80-85).
Even in the telling of her sordid tale, she maintains a sense
of innocence: "She spoke quite simply of things vile
-- / of devils with an angel's face; it seemed the sunshine
of her smile / Must purify the foulest place" (88-91).
Part IV: Claude Lake vs. Currer Bell
Born in 1816, Charlotte Brontë was 25 years older than
Blind. While Jane Eyre was published in 1847, the majority
of Blind's works were published in the 1880s and 90s. Still,
both writers faced similar challenges, and explored similar
themes in their works, such as the entrapping nature of the
institutions of Victorian society and the lack of opportunities
available for Victorian women. Like Brontë, Blind entered
the British literary world under a male pseudonym, a choice
influenced by patriarchal dominance of the 19th century British
literary scene.
In "The Russian Student's Tale", Blind addresses
several relevant themes that echo those of Jane Eyre, though
she arguably does so in a far less subtle manner. The question
of employment opportunities for women runs through both works,
as we see Jane's limited economic prospects exaggerated in
the sordid past of the young woman spurned by her lover.
Both Jane Eyre and "The Russian Student's Tale"
contain frequent references to the natural world. Brontë's
novel abounds with vivid, deliberately placed depictions of
the environment surrounding its characters. This technique
is particularly effective in a first-person narrative, given
that the reader watches the tale unfold solely through Jane's
eyes. Descriptions of weather, landscape, and the seasons
provide discreet emotional clues, and emphasize pivotal events
in the heroine's life.
Page 117 of the novel includes a quintessential example of
Brontë's technique, intertwining her description of the
natural world with Jane's aspirations as the young woman surveys
the landscape outside of her small living quarters, indirectly
referring to her own dreams and hopes for the future:
I went to the window, opened it, and looked out. There
were the two wings of the building; there was the garden;
there were the skirts of Lowood; there was the hilly horizon.
My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote,
the blue peaks. It was those I longed to surmount; all within
their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile
limits. I traced the white road winding round the base of
one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between two. How I
longed to follow it farther!
Taken literally, this passage seems to simply be a depiction
of the view from Jane's window. Beneath the surface, however,
the astute reader can see an inherent correlation between
her desire to surmount the mountains and her yearnings to
escape her unfulfilling existence at Lowood. Just as Jane
wishes to follow the white road farther, she is determined
to change the largely predetermined path of her young life,
and to that end, achieve a higher, more meaningful place in
society.
Similarly, the opening of "A Russian Student's Tale"
makes use of natural, pastoral imagery to underscore the purity
and beauty of the relationship of the two lovers before the
woman's revelation: "gardens fairy-like with flowers
/ And parks of twilight green and closes, / The very Paradise
of roses" (25-27). After her past has been revealed,
her face becomes "like a horrible eclipse, / which blots
the sunlight from the skies" (119-120). The speaker also
continually returns to the image of the nightingale, whose
initial "love song" is transformed, by the end of
the poem, into a "last sob".
Works Cited
"Blind, Karl." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Retrieved 3 Apr.
2003.
<http://www.bartleby.com/65>
Diedrick, James. "My Love is a Force that Will Force
you to Care: Subversive Sexuality in Mathilde Blind's Dramatic
Monologues". Victorian Poetry 40.4 (2001): 359-386.
Robinson, Bonnie J. "Individable Incorporate: Poetic
Trends in Women Writers, 1890-1918." Victorian Poetry
38.1 (2000): 1-14.
The Victorian Women Writer's Project: An Electronic Collection.
General Editor Perry Willett. 2001. Indiana University. Retrieved
2 Apr. 2003. <http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp>
Vallance, Richard. "The Dead by Mathilde Blind."
Poetry Life and Times
(Aug. 2001). Retrieved 2 Apr. 2003.
<http://funcity.org/~cafe-po/valrevw1.html>
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