The Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry by O'Brien Lee Christine;

Author:O'Brien, Lee Christine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tighe here outdoes Apuleius: “Although Apuleius’s narrator describes Cupid as naughty, his Cupid never deliquesces into a pool of liquid ecstasy when his mother kisses him” (737).

Tighe manages to avoid directly described sexual passion between Cupid and Psyche by replacing it with directly expressed sexual passion between Cupid and his mother, raising the question of why it is acceptable to Tighe’s contemporaries that a woman deal in incest, but not heterosexual passion (given that myth allows both). If Linkin reads Tighe’s intentions rightly, heterosexual passion is “safely” deflected into incest. If it is maternal in origin and inflection, therefore, a woman’s sexual knowledge may pass uncensured. Tighe’s description of Psyche’s nakedness is communicated by inhabiting the male gaze:

Wrapt in a cloud unseen by mortal eye,

He sought the chamber of the royal maid;

There, lulled by careless soft security,

Of the impending mischief nought afraid,

Upon her purple couch was Psyche laid,

He radiant eyes a downy slumber sealed;

In light transparent veil alone arrayed,

Her bosom’s opening charms were half revealed,

And scarce the lucid folds her polished limbs concealed.

(canto 1, stanza 25)

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