Keats, Modesty and Masturbation by Schulkins Rachel

Author:Schulkins, Rachel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2014-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Poetic Sympathy, Romance and the Female Rebel

Keats is self-conscious of the distance between Isabella and him, between her private feelings and his ability to express them. Though he tries to invade Isabella’s private world of fantasy and love, all he is capable of rendering is an outward look of her sorrow. Isabella’s social annihilation and grief put her beyond the narrative frame of Keats’s poem and imagination. For example, in lines 422–6 Keats is only capable of describing Isabella hanging over her basil and watering it with her tears, while her anguish and distress are left for the reader to infer from the picture portrayed. In order to narrow the gap between Isabella’s external description and her inner feelings, Keats adjusts an elegiac mode to help his readers understand her sorrow (Pite 195). For example, Keats’s narrative voice while depicting Isabella’s efforts in the forest is a distant voice describing Isabella’s despairing actions as she digs out Lorenzo’s body:

Who hath not loiter’d in a green church-yard,

And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,

Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,

To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;

Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr’d,

And filling it once more with human soul?

Ah! this is holiday to what was felt

When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.

She gaz’d into the fresh-thrown mould, as though

One glance did fully all its secrets tell;

Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know

Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;

Upon the murderous spot she seem’d to grow,

Like to a native lily of the dell;

Then with her knife, all sudden, she began

To dig more fervently than misers can. (lines 353–68)

Keats draws on familiar images and situations he believes the reader will be able to understand and through them sympathise with Isabella’s distress. He takes the idea of loss and extends the pain engulfed in this common sorrow in order to touch upon Isabella’s nightmare and draw it out to the reader. But Keats’s narrative voice fails to actually penetrate Isabella’s heart and mind. All we get to see is her body kneeling and digging feverishly, stopping for short intervals to throw back her ‘veiling hair’ (line 376).

Like Isabella’s maid, the reader is merely an eyewitness to Isabella’s anguish. Isabella’s remoteness is exemplified as she reaches the ‘kernel of [Lorenzo’s] grave’. Once Isabella uncovers Lorenzo’s head, she acts calmly, not pounding or raving for her loss. Keats’s failure to disclose Isabella’s emotional turmoil and agony prevents the reader from penetrating the partition she puts between herself and her surroundings. As the poem develops towards its end, Isabella further withdraws within herself, repudiating even the linguistic medium of social interaction:

Piteous she look’d on dead and senseless things,

Asking for her lost basil amorously;

And with melodious chuckle in the strings

Of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry

After the pilgrim in his wanderings,

To ask him where her basil was; and why

‘Twas hid from her; ‘For cruel ‘tis’, said she,

‘To steal my basil-pot away from me’. (lines 489–96)

Throughout the poem Isabella does not say much, but after recovering Lorenzo’s head, she retreats into an almost silent existence (Nelson 20).

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