Anne Bannerman: A Critical Introduction.
By Adriana Craciun
The poet Anne Bannerman (1765-1829) was born on
31 October 1765 in Edinburgh, the daughter of William Bannerman and Isobel Dick.
William Bannerman was a "running stationer," a street ballad singer
and merchant, and this early familiarity with the Scottish ballad tradition
served Anne Bannerman well in her literary career. After her death, Walter Scott
praised her ballads in his important "Essay on Imitations of the Ancient
Ballad" (1830), noting her poetry's characteristic obscurity:
Bannerman was the only female poet Scott included in this essay on Scottish
ballads, and she remains significant for her "mystical" and
"abrupt" Gothic ballads, as well as for her innovative sonnet series
and her bold original odes in her first volume, Poems (1800). Writing in
these and other diverse poetic genres, Bannerman is both representative of the
rich variety of women poets of the Romantic period, and particularly significant
because of her unique contributions to the ballad revival associated with Percy's
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Scott's and Leyden's Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border (1802-3).
Bannerman participated in the Edinburgh poetic
circle that also included John Leyden, Thomas Campbell, and Dr. Robert Anderson.
Anderson, the editor of the Edinburgh Magazine, encouraged Bannerman's
publications from the late 1790s on, sending copies and praising her
Bannerman was an old friend, and possibly a romantic interest, of the poet, antiquarian and orientalist John Leyden (Scott's co-editor for the Minstrelsy). The two shared an interest in Scottish ballads and supernatural themes: Leyden's best-known ballad, "The Mermaid," appeared two years after Bannerman's own remarkable ode, "The Mermaid," was published in her 1800 Poems. In 1803, on the eve of his departure for India, Leyden had a disturbing confrontation with Bannerman that suggests that he and Bannerman had been quite close, perhaps romantically; he confided to their mutual friend William Erskine that Bannerman's "extreme irritability... for considerable time before my departure... rendered it quite impossible for me to keep any terms with her. Her character & temper is in some instances strangely unaccountable; but a few months before my departure, I was almost convinced (at least she strenuously attempted to convince me) that she had accomplished a quarrel... between us. As I could not forgive her for this, I saw her no more till the night of my departure for London.... When I saw you [Erskine] my mind was a perfect vortex, and the ideas I had long cherished deep in my soul were too dear to me even to subject them to discussion. I forgot every unpleasant idea & ever attempted to retain only the recollection of Miss. B's good qualities. My whole frame was indeed in a state of great exhaustion" (15 September 1804, NLS MS 971). After Leyden's death in India in 1811, his brother wrote to Bannerman to request the return of his brother's correspondence, which she had saved from almost certain destruction after Leyden's executor had mysteriously abandoned his manuscripts.
Like most Romantic writers, she began her career by publishing in the periodicals, as "Augusta," "B," and under her own name in the Monthly Magazine, the Poetical Register, and Edinburgh Magazine. Her first volume, Poems, was widely praised in reviews and correspondence, though it did not sell well. Poems contains a series of remarkable original odes, as well as a sonnet series translated from Petrarch, one series based on The Sorrows of Werther, and original sonnets. In her two sonnet series Bannerman expanded Joanna Baillie's theory of dramatic composition, elaborated in Baillie's "Introductory Discourse" to her Plays... on the Passions (1796), by applying it to the sonnet, explaining in Poems that "an attempt has been made in the 'Sonnets from Werter' [sic], to delineate the progress of a single passion.... In this manner a unity may be communicated" (Poems (1807) 220 ). A great admirer of Baillie, Bannerman sent her a presentation copy of Poems, and Baillie replied that "[t]o be thought well of by my country women, and remembered in the land which I love, will always be to me the most gratifying reward of my labours" (Baillie to Bannerman 9 June, 1800).
Bannerman's longer 1800 poems, such as "The Genii" and "Ode: The Spirit of the Air" were often singled out for praise in reviews, and developed a sublime and visionary poetic identity, as the Critical Review noted: "Anne Bannerman's Odes may be quoted as an irrefragable proof that the ardour, whatever be its gender, which gives birth to lofty thought and bold expression, may glow within a female breast" (Critical Review s.2. vol. 31 (April 1801) 435). She may also have been the author of the anonymous verse Epistle from The Marquis de LaFayette to General Washington, also published in 1800 by Mundell & Son.
Her second volume, Tales of Superstition and
Chivalry (1802), published anonymously, was comprised of ten Gothic ballads
and four engravings, the fourth of which, "The Prophecy of Merlin,"
caused a small scandal because it featured a nude female figure, causing it to
be withdrawn from the volume, though some copies have survived. Unlike her
positively-reviewed 1800 volume, the Tales were frequently derided, with
critics and fellow poets such as Anna Seward growing frustrated with her Gothic
poetry's cultivation of the "palpable obscure" (Seward vol. 5, 325).
In 1802 she also translated several verse passages for Joseph Cooper Walker's An
The death of her mother in 1803 and of her brother left Bannerman without any source of income, and she began to support herself through the charity of friends such as Anderson, Park and Beattie. Anderson and Park obtained for her a new edition of her poems by subscription, hoping she could live off the interest. At first reluctant to publish by subscription, Bannerman soon agreed, though the volume, Poems. A New Edition (1807) sold poorly and had insufficient subscribers to grant her an annuity. The volume included most of the poems in the 1800 and 1802 volumes, with some revised and some new works, such as her poem "To Miss Baillie." Park was able to obtain £20 from the Royal Literary Fund for her in 1805, though an attempt to gain her a pension failed. With Anderson's help and insistence, in 1807 Bannerman accepted the position of governess for Lady Frances Beresford's daughter in Exeter for £60 per year. She visited Park in Hampstead during this time, and by the early 1810s was back in Scotland, existing at least partially through gifts from the Beresford family. In 1824 she visited the writer Anne Grant, who commented on Bannerman's progressively worse illness, "high intellectual powers," and "her little irritations [which] never disturbed me but on her own account" (Memoir 3: 162).
On 29 September 1829 Bannerman died an invalid and in debt in Portobello, near Edinburgh, with two of her poems appearing in The Laurel (1830) and The Casket (1829). After her death, Lady Frances Beresford paid £22 toward Bannerman's debts and spoke fondly of her, though she urged a mutual friend to destroy all of Bannerman's letters. Andrew Ashfield's Romantic Women Poets: Volume II (1998) included a selection of some of Bannerman's best poems, the only known reprinting of her work since 1830.
In her brief literary career, Anne Bannerman (1765-1829) published a remarkable series of supernatural ballads, original odes, and sonnets in such volumes as Poems (1800) and Tales of Superstition and Chivalry (1802). Bannerman deliberately situated her ballads, not in the self-consciously Scottish tradition of Leyden's and Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3), but in the Gothic tradition of Mathew Lewis, author of the scandalous Gothic novel The Monk (1796) and editor of the volume of ballads Tales of Wonder (1801). Dr. Robert Anderson, Bannerman's friend and the influential editor of the Complete British Poets (1792-1795), praised the "strength and splendour" of Bannerman's poetry, and confessed that "so opulent a mind at such an age is a phenomenon." Poems (1800) fared well with critics, who were impressed by the sublimity of her odes, but Bannerman's ballad collection, Tales of Superstition, was greeted by critical hostility and sold poorly, despite the admiration of influential admirers like Scott, Bishop Percy, and Anderson. Following this commercial failure, Bannerman's literary career foundered, and the incomeless author struggled to make her living as a governess. Her commercial failure and resulting obscurity result from a complex set of forces: the material circumstances of her books' production; their critical (mis)timing and reception; her precarious position in an important (and masculine) Edinburgh literary circle that included Anderson, John Leyden, Thomas Campbell, Jessie Stewart; and last but not least, as Bannerman put it herself to her publisher, her poems' "peculiarity of subject," because of which "it was not to be expected that they could please generally" (letter to Hood, 17 Oct. 1804).
What little we know about Bannerman's life we
know largely through Robert Anderson's letters, detailing his efforts to help
her publish, and her destitution and depression after the death of her brother
and mother, which left her impoverished, alone, and "inconsolable."
Anderson's letters from 1800 to 1807 show his growing disapproval of Bannerman's
efforts at self-education and a literary career. He consistently recommended
that she renounce the hope of becoming a serious and self-supporting writer, and
urged her to become a governess, which she eventually did in 1807. For example,
Anderson wrote that "My ideas of moral duty have inclined me, from the
beginning, to give the preference to the scheme of tuition as the means of
living a livelihood
According to the parish register, Bannerman's
father had been a "running stationer," a street merchant authorized to
sell and sing broadside ballads. Bannerman's familiarity with the ballad
tradition, both literary and oral, is evident in her strongest work, Tales of
Superstition and Chivalry. In 1830, the year after Bannerman's death, Scott
praised her in his "Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad,"
published in the new edition of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
Scott pinpointed the evocative quality of her poetry that reviewers had long
remarked upon:
Bannerman's ballads are indeed "too mystical and too abrupt," and as
Scott recognized, their genius lies in their consistent thwarting of their
reader's will to truth. Bannerman mastered the ballad form that Bürger, Lewis
and Coleridge are renowned for, and imbued it with an even higher degree of
generic self-awareness by foregrounding the enigmatic significance of femininity
for the Gothic and the ballad.
Like Scott, reviewers of Tales of Superstition
and Chivalry also noted the cultivated obscurity of Bannerman's ballads:
In five of her ten Tales of Superstition and Chivalry, this "palpable obscure" is embodied in female figures that are never satisfactorily unveiled: "The Dark Ladie," "The Prophetess of the Oracle of Seäm," "The Penitent's Confession," "The Prophecy of Merlin" and "The Festival of St. Magnus." By exciting our desire to unveil the feminized ideal, without pretending to satisfy this desire, Bannerman foregrounds the power and centrality of this feminized ideal in Romantic poetry, and simultaneously foregrounds the power of the poet in so expertly seducing her readers. Her poetry enacts a merciless critique of poetic mysticism and narrative expectations, and yet through this very process exercises and glorifies poetry's seductive powers.
The first ballad in Tales of Superstition,
"The Dark Ladie," directly responds to Coleridge's "Introduction
to the Tale of the Dark Ladie," thus placing Bannerman in dialogue with the
canonical Romantic tradition. Coleridge's "Introduction to the Tale of the
Dark Ladie," first published in the Morning Post (1799) and the Edinburgh
Magazine (1800), and later in the Lyrical Ballads (1800 onwards),
slightly altered, as "Love," was composed between part one and two of
"Christabel." Coleridge's poem uses the traditional Belle Dame sans
Merci figure as valuable pawn in a masculine sexual economy, a fantastic
"beautiful and bright" Fiend whose pride the poet makes an example of
in order to seduce his virginal beloved; the latter is also a figure of male
fantasy, for she is described in terms that echo the beautiful and bright fiend:
"And so I won my Genevieve, / My bright and beaut'ous bride" (2:
1059). His seduction complete when
Anne Bannerman published her own "sister
tale" of the Dark Ladie in Tales of Superstition and Chivalry. In
fact, she first published "The Dark Ladie" in the Edinburgh
Magazine, with a footnote directing readers to Coleridge's
"Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie," published in the same
journal one month earlier.
Bannerman's poem begins with the return of the
crusading Knights to celebrate their military victories at the castle of
brooding Sir Guyon, named for the Knight of Temperance in Book Two of Spenser's Faerie
Queene who "successfully" resisted Acrasia's temptations in the
Bower of Bliss. In Bannerman's revision of this classical scene of the dangers
and pleasures
The Ladie's veils, which allow her to look out but prevent the knights from looking in, frustrate the Romantic desire for the ideal, a desire which the veils, of course, simultaneously represent and in fact generate. All who see the Dark Ladie are struck by the unearthly eyes that penetrate her veils from the inside out, and the corresponding engraving in Bannerman's volume illustrates precisely such a moment. She is thus an impossibility — a feminine, exoticized object that not only resists and foregrounds her objectification through her multiple veils, but returns it by reducing the (male colonial) subjects of the gaze to silent and immobile objects: "But, from the Ladie in the veil, / Their eyes they could not long withdraw, / And when they tried to speak, that glare / still kept them mute with awe!"
The Dark Ladie is not once but doubly veiled,
which, in addition to signaling the Ladie's racial and religious otherness as a
Muslim, also recalls Coleridge's Ladie. She wears the white wedding veil, for as
in Coleridge's poem she was cheated out of marriage, and the black veil which
here signifies death, for the poem suggests that the Ladie is a revenant
returned for revenge. The double veil suggests more than double resistance to
unveiling — it suggests endless veils, the impossibility of depth and its
latent meanings. "The veil is the place of any voided
We should remember that the same journals that
complained of Bannerman's obscurity and narrative confusion had also dismissed
Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" as "a rhapsody of
unintelligible wildness and incoherence," a "confusion of
images," and an unconnected series of stanzas that are "absurd or
unintelligible,"
Like "The Dark Ladie," Bannerman's "The Prophetess of the Oracle of Seäm" is an antinarrative that centers on a female figure that cannot be unveiled. The poem builds on a brief note from Drayton's Polyolbion about the mythical isle of Seäm in the English Channel where nine virgin priestesses were said to tend an oracle and possess supernatural powers. More significantly, she may be combining this obscure reference with Schiller's "The Veiled Image of Saïs," which she may have read given that, although his poetry was not yet widely known in Britain, fugitive translations had appeared in periodicals which also included Bannerman's poems (such as the Monthly Magazine and the Poetical Register). In Schiller's poem, an Egyptian youth penetrates beyond the veil in the temple of Isis in order to see the truth unveiled, and pays with his life, being afterward stunned into silence. Like Nietzsche and Percy Bysshe Shelley in "[Lift Not the Painted Veil]," Bannerman counsels against lifting the veil: she too does not "believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn" (Nietzsche 38). Yet her Prophetess of Seäm does not wait, like Schiller's Isis, for men to seek her out and violate her temple — she destroys passing ships with her voice and selects specific men — priests — to bring behind the veil. Bannerman's use of the veiled feminine ideal is proto-feminist, for her priestess of the oracle is active, not an ideal and absent object of male pursuit. And, significantly, Bannerman never reveals the priestess, so that we do not know what it was, if anything, that the priest saw behind the veil of the shrine, only that its presence, or absence, shattered his faith and reduced him to a living phantom.
Bannerman is fascinated by moments of unveiling, which are repeated and deferred through narrative frames in many of her ballads. Bannerman consciously frames her ballads of the Dark Ladie and of the Prophetess of Seäm through a series of narrative repetitions that signal the endless deferral of ideal presence on which poetic language depends. She also draws inspired poetry dangerously close to a curse, for the men who encounter the Dark Ladie and Prophetess are never happy again, and like Coleridge's wedding guest, leave stunned by what they have heard (though not necessarily wiser). Yet this deferral and repetition, while negating poetry's power to speak the truth, simultaneously affirms the power of poetry to curse. Bannerman's complex narrative cycles are an innovative outgrowth of the incremental repetition characteristic of eighteenth century ballads (for example, in Coleridge's repeated use of "beautiful" and "bright" to link the bride and fiend in "Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie"). Bannerman's mastery of the ballad form, oral and literary, allows her to take these Gothic ballads to new levels of narrative complexity.
Bannerman's "The Prophetess of the Oracle
of Seäm" uses a complex and deliberately disorienting series of narrative
cycles to undermine the possibility of narrativity itself. The ballad
"begins" on a doomed ship with a priest, Father Paul, repeating the
legend of the Prophetess who destroys passing ships like a siren, as he had
heard the tale told by the sole survivor (another priest) of such a shipwreck in
the past:
"And he told them of the Prophetess
And the Oracle below!
"He told the tale of Seäm's isle,
He told the terrors of its caves,
That none had passed them with life
When that sleep was on the waves !
"He told them, when the winds that roar'd
Around that isle had ceas'd to breathe,
Was the fated night of sacrifice
In the gloomy vaults beneath.
"He told them, he remember'd once
A father of St. Thomas' tower,
Till he touch'd his dying hour.
"That then he named to the priest
What he had seen in Seäm's caves,
For he had reach'd them in a ship
When that calm was on the waves !
"Thro' the sleepless nights of thirty months,
He had listen'd to that shriek of woe;
But he never had seen the Prophetess
Of the Oracle below !
"Till that chilly night, at the equinox height,
When the thirty months were gone,
As he listen'd, in the outer cave,
To that unbroken groan,
"A hand, he saw not, dragg'd him on,
The voice within had call'd his name !
And he told all he witnessed
At the Oracle of flame !
"But when he came to tell, at last,
What fearful sacrifice had bled,
His agony began anew,
And he could not raise his head!
"And he never spoke again at all,
For he died that night in sore dismay:
So sore, that all were tranc'd for hours
That saw his agony! (22-25)
As in this tale that Father Paul tells the sailors, their ship is destroyed and
he alone is taken beneath the sea to the oracle.
The "central" story of the Prophetess
at Seäm's shrine is this reiteration and continuation of the story Father Paul
himself had heard from the previous priest, a member of his order (St. Thomas'
Tower at Einsidlin, alluding to Thomas the Rhymer). The third-person narrator
shows us how when Father Paul himself encounters the Prophetess' oracle, he is
in fact remembering it, by recounting the stories he had heard from past
priests, so that his own account of the truth behind the veil, like all such
accounts, is mediated:
Like a dream it flitted o'er his brain.
That miserable hour!
When he father died, in agony,
In the cell of St. Thomas' tower;
For he had said the veil was drawn
That hid the sacrifice within;
That his eyes had seen the Prophetess
At that uncover'd shrine;
But whether his knee had bended there
Was buried with him in the grave:...
He felt that doubt most terrible
Than the terrors of the cave.... (33, orig. ellipsis)
The poem "ends" when, forty years later, a new priest encounters the
ghostly Father Paul, who like the poet (and preacher) in Shelley's "Lift
Not the Painted Veil," "strove [f]or truth, and... found it not."
Father Paul's return to his order at Einsidlin on Pentecost creates another
silent and haunted figure in the new priest presiding at the altar: "It
awed the priest of Einsidlin, / And he could not speak at all!"
One possible explanation for Father Paul's despair is that he may have "bent his knee / At Seäm's dark, unhallow'd shrine," putting aside his crucifix and worshipping another deity, a distinctly female one. This is precisely Swinburne's deepest desire in his poem "Dolores," to pass "from the outermost portal / To the shrine where a sin is a prayer," overturning Christianity's empire by worshipping the older chthonic goddesses of the underworld. Bannerman's Christian priests enter this shrine, though she never resolves for us what precisely their sin is, or if they even commit one, or what divine or infernal deity, if any, inhabits the shrine. She leaves all possibilities open, so that we readers are in the same position as those who listen, spellbound, to the legendary tale of the powers of this oracle. All priests (and faithful readers) collapse into one another in this poem, and the mystical revelation at the heart of each of their narratives emerges as an effect of the endless creation, pursuit, and deferral of divine presence in readings of poetry that search for truths (readings frustrated by Bannerman's obscurity, such as Scott's, Seward's and the Poetical Register's).
Bannerman's antinarrative techniques can be compared fruitfully to Scott's, particularly in order to consider her Tales in the larger context of the Scottish ballad tradition. As Robert Crawford points out, Scott's abrupt shift to the present in The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) anticipates Keats's use of this technique in "The Eve of St. Agnes": "Scott forcefully details past actions, and then abruptly jolts us back across the centuries into the present, making the past appear both vivid and remote" (117). Scott does this as part of his larger "anthropological" and aesthetic project of presenting Scotland's past. Leith Davis argues that, as in the Last Minstrel, "Scott's attitude in the Minstrelsy anticipates the ambiguity found in much of his later work, as he both regrets the passing of the old ways of life and normalizes their passing" (156). Bannerman's presentation of the past is not in the anthropological mode of the Minstrelsy. Like the Minstrelsy, Tales of Superstition is a ballad collection accompanied by scholarly notes, which instead of tracing the historical authenticity or specificity of the ballads, emphasizes their literariness, and the wide-ranging education of the poet. Because they are for the most part set in feudal Catholic Europe (much like the English Gothic romances of Radcliffe and Lewis), Bannerman's ballads do not share the "thematic core of the Scottish Gothic" of Scott and Hogg that Ian Duncan argues "consists of an association between the national and the uncanny or supernatural." Although she does explore national conflict in "The Dark Ladie" and "The Murcian Cavalier," the "uncanny recursion of an ancestral identity alienated from modern life" (ibid) in Bannerman's Gothic is not a national identity but a sexual one. Typically, this demonized ancestral past returns to revenge a sexual, not a national crime. In "The Perjured Nun," "The Festival of St. Magnus" and "The Penitent's Confession," the revenants are seduced or murdered women, while in "The Murcian Cavalier" the revenant knight is a familiar demon lover who seduces the woman who loves him. Like the Dark Ladie and Prophetess ballads, these revenant ballads from Tales of Superstition reveal a (proto)feminist Scottish Gothic immersed in the supernatural ballad tradition and its sexual politics.
By embracing and in fact amplifying the poetics of the Gothic in her ballads, Bannerman linked her work to the fate of Tales of Wonder, Tales of Terror, "Tales of Plunder," Tales of the Devil, and so on — parodic excesses from which early practitioners like Scott and Leyden eventually distanced themselves as they assumed respectable positions as editors, orientalists, and antiquarians. The association of Bannerman's poetry with Lewis's Tales of Wonder and the Tales of Terror seems to have been particularly damaging. Tales of Superstition's anonymous publication in 1802 no doubt fueled speculation as to the volume's relationship to these volumes of the previous year. The British Critic's review noted that "This beautiful little book belongs, as its title implies, to the family of Tales of Wonder," and complained that its fancy "is fancy perverted to the purpose of raising only horror." The Critical Review also acknowledged the Tales' similarity to Tales of Wonder, though it also compared Bannerman's ballads to those of Leyden, Scott and Wordsworth (110). And the British Library's copy of Bannerman's Tales bears a telling inscription on the flyleaf — "By Monk Lewis" — anecdotal evidence of Bannerman's affinity with the leading writer of the so-called male Gothic, an association that in this instance appears to have backfired. Thomas Park tried to head off precisely this association by recommending in 1802 that Bannerman change the title to the more respectable Metrical Legends; or Tales of Other Times, though the Tales of Superstition appeared as planned (letter to Anderson, Jan. 1802, NLS MS 22.4.10).
While Charlotte Dacre, in her novel Zofloya;
or, The Moor (1806), negotiated successfully the dangers of association with
Lewis's Gothic, Scott, Coleridge and Bannerman fared differently. Coleridge's
"Rime of the Ancyent Marinere" was famously dismissed by Southey as a
"Dutch attempt at German sublimity," and his 1817 gloss to the poem
reshaped his Gothic ballad through a redemptive Christian teleology. Bannerman's
ballads were overtly written in the antinarrative, deliberately inauthentic
tradition of the early Coleridge, Lewis, and Scott, so much so that Anna Seward
denounced Bannerman's poems as parodies of Coleridge:
What Seward deliberately overlooks is that Coleridge's ballads are themselves
deliberately inauthentic. Like Bannerman's ballads, they are imitations of
imitations, whose aesthetic value lies to a large extent in this deliberately
inauthentic self-critical gesture. The ideology of authenticity and sincerity,
which would eventually gain critical ascendancy (and distinctiveness as
"Romanticism"), cannot accommodate the poetic successes of Bannerman,
Dacre and Lewis (and to a significant degree the 1798 Coleridge), but instead
traces the rise of Romanticism through the "authenticity" of the Minstrelsy
and the Reliques, the "simplicity" of the Lyrical Ballads,
and the historicist "maturity" of the Waverley novels. Hence Seward's
further complaint that Bannerman's ballads also "adopt lines & half
lines also, from Mr. Scott's noble epic ballads, — but it is impossible their
author cou'd mean to ridicule what are in themselves of faultless
excellence."
The dangers of Lewis's Gothic proved to be
visual as well as verbal. The brief scandal caused by the fourth and final
engraving ("The Prophecy of Merlin") in Tales of Superstition offers a
final insight into the sexual politics of publishing that Bannerman and other
women poets contended with. Bannerman had intended to illustrate Tales of
Superstition with woodcuts, presumably to evoke a Gothic atmosphere (like
the Tales of Terror), but her publisher was unable to secure woodcutters,
and instead hired engravers.
Called "offensive to decency" by one
reader,
The incident, no doubt painful to the poet, becomes an opportunity for masculine
jests suggesting that the age of chivalry is not dead; it also reveals that Park
(and Anderson) viewed the world of publishing as essentially masculine, where
fair authoresses venture at their peril, and must be rescued by heroic male
patrons.
Park requested that the offensive engraving be removed from copies of Tales of Superstition still in the publisher's possession, and it seems a half-hearted effort was made to follow his direction (which may or may not have represented the author's wishes). An examination of 16 copies of Tales reveals that in fact only five copies are missing the final engraving, whereas 10 copies include all four. One copy lacks both "The Dark Ladie" and "The Prophecy of Merlin," an important reminder that perhaps the missing engravings were removed at a later date because they were desirable, not because they were offensive. These two engravings were the most striking of the four, and readers at any point in the last two hundred years may have removed the engravings for personal reasons that Park or Bannerman could not have foreseen. But the publishers must have been careful to censor the review copies, because the British Critic mentioned only three plates.
Park concluded that the controversy is itself
evidence of the lack of a classical education on the part of all those upset
(the poet included implicitly):
Classical and poetical figures, then, have no connection to real women,
especially those who must live by selling their bodies. Park insists on the
traditional masculine (that is, "gentlemanly") distinction between an
ideal nude and an actual naked woman, as Lynda Nead described it in The
Female Nude:
Park's letter tries to reaffirm this distinction between ideal and actual woman,
the Celestial Venus and the terrestrial one. This ideal-actual distinction is
always threatened with collapse in Bannerman's volume, and in enforcing this
distinction, Park implicitly allies poetic vision with the ideal, arguing that
the ideal woman is the appropriate object of (male) vision. The consequences of
his idealization for the actual woman poet are disastrous.
The visual correspondence between the first and
fourth engravings, "The Dark Ladie" and "The Prophecy of
Merlin" (links to engravings?), moreover, reveals that the artist relied on
the same composition for both subjects. Both engravings show an awe-struck
knight kneeling before a supernatural woman with arms raised, bearing a charmed
cup. When juxtaposed, the engravings suggest the Dark Ladie veiled and unveiled,
the artist's satisfactory denouement of Bannerman's frustrating (anti)narratives
of veiled meanings. Also, in "The Dark Ladie" it is the Knight who
averts his eyes before the Ladie, while in "The Prophecy of Merlin" it
is the nude female figure who averts her gaze and assumes a receptive, open
posture characteristic of
The obscure fate of Anne Bannerman's poetry was
the consequence of a complex series of cultural mediations, as Park and Anderson
discussed in their letters. "Part of this failure" of Tales of
Superstition, wrote Park, "& I think, the greater part, is
imputable to the want of Miss B's recommending name, to a delay in publishing
till the Tales of Terror had appeared, and to an injudicious[ly]"
large number of copies published.
Thus Jerome McGann argues that criticism must account for these "mediational
structures" of production and distribution, because as Park's letter
demonstrated, literary works are always "embodied in such structures"
(117). Gender was central to these mediational structures: book production,
distribution and reception. The engraving scandal and her lack of professional
options demonstrate, as do the examples of so many other women poets of the
Romantic period, the uphill battle women faced in publishing in this period
when, nevertheless, hundreds of women poets flourished.
While Park and Anderson understood the complex
factors involved in literary meaning, success, and failure, the most important
criterion in both of their assessments of Bannerman's failure remained her
gender, and its incompatibility with that of a poet. The problem finally lay in
"her having received an education above her condition" and her
stubborn resistance to returning to this destined condition.
Bannerman was a (marginal) member of the most
influential publishing circle in Edinburgh — marginal because it is literally
only in the margins of the correspondence of Anderson, Scott, Percy, Heber,
Cooper Walker, Park, Leyden and Erskine that one finds traces of Bannerman's
life and work. Yet if we shift our focus to the female tradition of Scottish
women's poetry, we see how Bannerman both attempts to position her work through
connections to central figures like Baillie, and how she influences other poets.
Yes! tho' these lines the feeble effort own,
The soul that stamps them bears another tone!
That soul hath trac'd thee in thy towering flight. (Poems (1807) 110)
Early reviews of Bannerman's Poems had admired precisely "the sublimer and
more energetic" qualities of her writing, typically "the productions
of a masculine spirit": "Anne Bannerman's Odes may be quoted as an
irrefragable proof that the ardour, whatever be its gender, which gives birth to
lofty thought and bold expression may glow within a female breast" (Rev. of
Poems, Critical Review, 438-9).
Bannerman's Poems (1800) had included
many original odes and three long poems, "The Nun," "The
Genii," and "Verses on an Illumination for a Naval Victory," the
latter two repeatedly praised and quoted in the volume's many positive reviews.
A contemporary admirer of Bannerman's Poems praised the sublime range of
her imagination:
The tuneful maid I hail from winding Forth,
Who female sweetness joins to manly worth,
And, while her muse the guilty laurel sings,
By blood-stain'd myriads wreath'd for frantic kings,
Humanely wise, beholds with temperate ray,
The dazzling things that lead the crowd astray.
Undaunted, now, she roams the wizard cave,
She scales the crag where deafening billows rave,
Or hears, at midnight hour, the mutter'd spell
Convoke the shrouded dead, and forms of hell.
The sublimity of "The Genii" and "Verses on an
Illumination," like that of the odes "The Mermaid" and "The
Spirit of the Air," marks Poems as a significant volume for anyone
interested in examining the sublime in women's Romantic-period poetry.
The sublime qualities of her "masculine
spirit," praised by early reviewers of Poems , increasingly troubled her
male patrons and the reviewers of the Tales (especially when that masculine
spirit was likened to Lewis's), but nevertheless also attracted other women
poets. Thomas Park noted with approval that Jessie Stewart had "watched the
bold flights of Miss Bannerman with the eye of a parnassian eaglet" (letter
to Anderson, 9 Dec. 1801, NLS MS 22.4.10). Writing as "Adeline,"
Jessie Stewart published numerous poems in periodicals which in some cases are
indistinguishable from Bannerman's. Stewart's poems such as "The Seraph: An
Ode," "The Spirit of the Storm," "Verses on the Sea
Shore," as well as sonnets such as "Sonnet. To the Sea Bird,"
share with Bannerman's odes and storm poems a fascination with speaking in the
voice of tempests, an unusual quality for women poets.
The Shetland poet Dorothea Primrose Campbell
also favored such sublime landscapes and stormscapes popular with Scottish
Romantic poets, and Stuart Curran has perceived Bannerman's influence in
Campbell's works. Campbell's "Agnes and the Water Sprite" is a
beautiful demon lover ballad in the tradition of Lewis, Dacre, and Bannerman,
and poems like "The Storm" and "Lines Written on a Stormy Night.
1813" are drawn to the same scenes of sublime destruction that recur
throughout Bannerman's poems. Campbell's "The Fairy of the Wood,"
again in the demon lover ballad tradition of Dacre and Bannerman, explores the
poet's desire for the eroticized supernatural and unbounded imagination:
Where'er she turn'd, where'er she mov'd,
Still on her ear the witch-notes rung;
And hapless Mary sigh'd and lov'd,
While thus the unseen spirit sung: —
[...]
"I'll waft thee o'er the murm'ring sea,
Soft on some fleecy cloud reclin'd,
To dwell in Fairy vales with me,
And leave the haunts of humankind."
But — shall she from her home depart,
To range in quest of worlds unknown?
Say, shall she pierce her mother's heart,
And leave her sire to groan? (Poems (1816) 65, 67)
Romantic poets "in quest of worlds unknown" would be a fitting
description of Bannerman, Campbell, and Stewart, who we can see also share a
distinctly Scottish tradition. Campbell's poems are often set in Shetland and
Orkney, while Bannerman's typically avoid such geographical specifics in favor
of a more transcendent abstraction from time and place. But once we juxtapose
Bannerman's poems with those of Baillie, Stewart and Dorothea Primrose Campbell,
as well as of Scott, Leyden and Thomas Campbell, we can begin to remap Scottish
poetry, and Romantic-period poetry as a whole, in more historically-minded ways.
Bannerman aspired to the heights of Baillie's
talent (as Stewart did to Bannerman's), and through this connection we can begin
to glimpse a Scottish women's poetic tradition emerging, one in which sublimity
played a central role. It is no coincidence that an "opulent" poet of
such seductive female figures as inhabit the Tales of Superstition, who
ultimately leave their readers' desires unsatisfied, was discouraged from
continuing to publish, even though as I have shown, her poetry received warm
praise in the private correspondence of highly respected and influential
literary figures, and in early reviews. Perhaps it was not in spite but because
of Bannerman's poetry's "strength" and "splendour" that it
has all but disappeared. Her powerful female figures like the Prophetess and the
Dark Ladie, with their strange powers of speech and sorcery, present an
intriguing version of the Romantic woman poet, one which clearly lost out in the
end to the self-destructive poetess, the female poet figure favored by Victorian
editors and critics. Bannerman is one example of many women poets of the
Romantic period, among them Charlotte Smith, Letitia Landon, Mary Robinson,
Dorothea Primrose Campbell, and Maria Jane Jewsbury, whose unabashed
celebrations of sublimity, genius, and transcendence can no longer be overlooked
in re-assessments of the period and of British women's literature in general. Tales
Robert Anderson Correspondence, National
Library of Scotland, MS 22.4.10, MS 22.3.11; Edinburgh University MS La II 598.
Joanna Baillie, letter to Anne Bannerman, private collection.
Anne Bannerman, letter to Mr. Hood, British Library, Evelyn Papers 4, vol. 1,
p.12.
Lady Beresford, letter to Mrs. Walker, private collection.
Papers of William Erskine, National Library of Scotland MS 3112, 1675.
Papers Relating to John Leyden, National Library of Scotland MS 3380, 3381, 971.
Parish registry entry for Anne Bannerman, October 31, 1765, Edinburgh
Anderson, R.D. Education and the Scottish
People 1750-1918. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1995.
Archives of the House of Longman, 1794-1914. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey,
1978. Microfilm. A1 Reel 1 Items 83, 84, 164.
Ashfield, Andrew, ed. Romantic Women Poets: 1770-1838: An Anthology.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.
—. Romantic Women Poets Volume II: 1788-1848. An Anthology. Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1998.
Baird, William. Annals of Duddingston and Portobello. Edinburgh: Andrew
Elliott, 1898.
Bannerman, Anne. "The Dark Ladie." Edinburgh Magazine (March
1800) 218-20.
—. Epistle from the Marquis de La Fayette to General Washington.
Edinburgh:
—. Poems. Edinburgh: Mundell & Son; London: Longman & Rees,
1800.
—. Poems. A New Edition. Edinburgh: Mundell, Doig & Stevenson,
1807.
—. Tales of Superstition and Chivalry. London: Vernor & Hood, 1802.
Campbell, Dorothea Primrose. Poems, 1816. 2nd ed.
The Casket, A Miscellany, Consisting of Unpublished Poems. Ed. Mrs.
Blencowe. London: John Murray, 1829.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Ed. E.H. Coleridge. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1912.
—. "An Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie." Edinburgh
Magazine (Feb. 1800).
Cooper Walker, Joseph. An Historical and Critical Essay on the Revival of the
Drama in Italy. Edinburgh: Mundell & Son, 1805.
Craciun, Adriana. "Anne Bannerman." New Dictionary of National
Biography. Oxford UP, forthcoming.
—. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002.
—. "'I hasten to be disembodied': Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover, and
Representations of the Body," European Romantic Review, 6 (1995)
75-97.
Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon P,
1992.
Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1986.
Duncan, Ian. "Walter Scott, James Hogg, and Scottish Gothic." A
Companion to Gothic, ed. David Punter. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
Elfenbein, Daniel. "Lesbianism and Romantic Genius: The Poetry of Anne
Bannerman." ELH 63 (1996) 929-57.
Fowler, David. A Literary History of the Popular Ballad. Durham: Duke UP,
1968.
Griffin, Dustin. Literary Patronage in England, 1650-1800. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1996.
Hogg, James. "Storms" [1819]. The Shepherd's Calendar. Ed.
Douglas Mack. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995.
Johnson, Samuel. "Anningait and Ajut, a Greenland history." The
Rambler (no. 186). Vol. 5 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel
Johnson. Ed. W.J. Bate & Albrecht Strauss. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969.
210-15.
—. "The history of Anningait and Ajut concluded" (The Rambler
no. 187). Johnson 215-20.
The Laurel; Fugitive Poetry of the XIXth Century. London: J. Sharpe,
1830.
Lewis, Matthew. Tales of Wonder: written and collected by M.G. Lewis, Esq.
M.P., 2 vols. London: W. Bulmer; J
McGann, Jerome. Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of
Literary Work. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
Moir, D. M&dot. Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past
Half-Century. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1851.
Nead, Lynda. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Nichols, John, ed. Illustrations of Literary History of the Eighteenth
Century. Vol. 7. London: JB Nichols & Son, 1848.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Preface to the Second Edition. The Gay Science.
Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage, 1974.
Obituary of Anne Bannerman. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magzine 27 (January
1830) 135.
"On the Choice of Subjects for Engravings." Scots Magazine 64
(Oct. 1802) 825-28.
Park, Thomas. Letter on the behalf of Anne Bannerman. Archives of the Royal
Literary Fund, 1790-1918. Compiled by Nigel Cross. London: World Microfilms
Pub., 1982. Reel 5, file 170.
Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. NY: Meridian
Books, 1956.
Preston, William. "An Epistle to Robert Anderson, M.D. On receiving from
him a Present of various Poetical Works," Poetical Register (1805)
166-70.
Ridley, James. Tales of the Genii, Translated from the Persian. London:
C. Cooke, 1797.
Robertson, Fiona. Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of
Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994.
Robinson, Daniel. "Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet
Claim." European Romantic Review 6 (1995) 98-127.
Scott, Walter. "Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad" [1830]. Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border. Ed. T.F. Henderson. Edinburgh & London: William
Blackwood, 1902. Vol. 4.
Sedgwick, Eve Kossofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York:
Arno P, 1980.
Seward, Anna. The Letters of Anna Seward. Edinburgh: Constable, 1811.
Vol. 5 of 6.
Stewart, Jessie ("Adeline"). "The Sea Nymph." Poetical
Register of 1804 (1806) 58-61.
—. "The Seraph. An Ode." Poetical Register of 1801 (1802)
106-7.
—. "Sonnet
—. "The Spirit of the Storm
—. "Verses Written on the Sea-Shore." Poetical Register of 1801
(1802) 37- 39.
Stewart, Susan. "Scandals of the Ballad." Crimes of Writing:
Problems in the Containment of Representation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
"Strictures on Literary Patronage." Signed "A.M." Scots
Magazine 64 (July 1802) 807-10.