Poetry off the Page by Severin Laura;

Author:Severin, Laura;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

In a later poem, ‘The Wedding Photograph,’ the drawing of a giggling girl, dressed in party clothes (see below), is juxtaposed to a poem of a bride’s despair; the bride appears trapped in a loveless marriage, but the young girl of the drawing is unaffected by her despair or its cause.82

In ‘The Lady of the Well-Spring,’ it is the young girl Joan who runs away from a scene of domesticity, a French drawing room, into a landscape of nature, where she meets and decides to join the lady of the well spring.83 Not merely a period of relative genderlessness for Smith, girlhood became her cipher for escape and rebellion.

How Smith viewed adolescence is more difficult to trace, since the exact age of her girls is often impossible to discern. However, Smith does have one poem that directly concerns the female adolescent, ‘The Conventionalist,’ where she portrays a giggling, mindless girl who conforms to society’s expectations of femininity.84 Also, her poem ‘Valuable,’ addressed to teenage girls, marks Smith’s attempt to convince girls of their self-worth, in the face of society’s training.85 Although few in number, Smith’s adolescent girls, like their Victorian counterparts, leave behind their rebellious spirit and begin the process of conforming.

There is little ambiguity, however, about her adult women, who follow their expected social path of marriage and childbearing. These women are depicted as pathetic, or, at best, burdened by cares that they try to keep from their daughters. One of Smith’s most apparently cruel poems is ‘Wretched Woman,’ where the poem’s speaker criticizes a married woman for her inept housekeeping.86 Yet the accompanying drawing (see over page), which features a crying woman trying to cook a meal while a small child tugs on her leg, is less dismissive: The woman’s scrambling attempt to keep up her role, in the face of despair, undoes the judgmental poem that follows.

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