Memory and Memorials by Jr. Shapiro

Author:Jr. Shapiro [Shapiro, Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781351506021
Google: qD4rDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T04:58:32+00:00

As usual in Hemans, and indeed in much literature of the Romantic period, this impasse can be resolved only by death, the figure for ultimate impasse: Zayda and Hamet die and are buried in the same mountain cave. As the narrator puts it, they are ‘Severed in life, united in the tomb’.

The end is not quite oblivion, however, for the lovers live on united, in two ways. In transcendental and sublime, if non-human, Wordsworthian mode the lovers are somehow remembered in nature: ‘Their dirge’ becomes ‘the eternal moan’ of ‘woods and waves’. The lovers are also remembered, however tenuously, in human and social terms, and the lesson of their lives and deaths is passed on into history, for the narrator discloses that ‘Some exiled Moor . . . Hath taught his mountain-home the tale of those/Who thus have suffered, and who thus repose’. Zayda and Hamet are remembered in folktale, presumably of just the kind that was then being collected, edited, and entered into the ‘national’ history, culture, and destiny. Furthermore, Hemans’s poem, avowedly based on historical fact though fictionalized and versified, presumably serves a parallel function, disseminating the instructive tale as the new national institution of literature, or written verbal art of permanent artistic and cultural value. Hemans implicitly claims for herself, then, the role that she celebrates often elsewhere in her work - that of bard, or repository and reproducer of national identity, culture, history, and destiny, though in print rather than an oral culture, within a modern rather than a customary culture. In fact, almost throughout her career Hemans also translated or invented and published ‘national’ verse from a variety of languages and cultures.

In her poems of the early and mid-1820s Hemans shifts her emphasis to the dangers of internal conflict arising from destructive memory. The Vespers of Palermo and ‘The last Constantine’, The Siege of Valencia, ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ (all 1823) were published just after Britain had seemed to come to the brink of revolution over the ‘Queen Caroline affair’ in 1820—1, and while Spain, in which Hemans always had a special interest, was in the throes of a liberal revolution against a stubbornly traditionalist regime. The Siege of Valencia: A Dramatic Poem returns to the struggle of Christians and Moors in medieval Spain, and reprises the conflicts represented in ‘The Last of the Constantines’, with women playing both defeminizingly heroic and weakly disabling roles, yet defending ties of the domestic affections in face of masculine memories of heroic codes of honour and patriotism. Though the latter prevail, the cost is domestic loss. The Vespers of Palermo: A Tragedy represents the fatal effects, individually and collectively, of memories of class, as a faction led by the exiled noble Procida raises a murderous revolt against those who have injured them. In the process, the conspirators unwittingly destroy those they love, who represent the domestic affections and the socially conciliatory ‘feminine’ virtues of love and forgiveness.

In The Forest Sanctuary (1825) and Records of Woman (1828), her major works, Hemans

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.