ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which Romantic author Charlotte Turner Smith mounts a subtle but invasive protest against differing structures of power. I seek first to establish Smith’s forms of protest as subtle, often hidden behind the persona of a genteel lady, a suffering mother, or a damsel in distress. Though Smith’s use of these personae as a way for her to embody a variety of subject positions is critically well-established, less attention has been paid to Smith’s protests against formal structures and the ways in which certain forms provide constraints for the woman writer. This article explores the ways in which Smith enacts her own particular form of protest in her third novel, Celestina (1791), in which she explores a hybrid form, blending poetry and narrative, to think through how these forms are interpreted by writers and readers. Smith establishes the competing desires of the poet and her audience in order to protest against a constraining type of literary interpretation which upholds an arbitrary separation of literary forms. Rather, Smith argues, the true power of protest can be captured through hybridization of these forms and a style of interpretation which embraces formal complexity.

摘要

本文探讨了浪漫主义作家夏洛特·特纳·史密斯 (Charlotte Turner Smith) 对不同权力结构进行微妙但具有侵略性的抗议的方式。我首先试图将史密斯的抗议形式确立为微妙的，通常隐藏在一个优雅的女士、一个受苦的母亲或一个遇险的少女的角色背后。尽管史密斯使用这些人物作为她体现各种主题立场的一种方式已经非常成熟，但很少有人关注史密斯对正式结构的抗议以及某些形式为女作家提供约束的方式。这篇文章探讨了史密斯在她的第三部小说《塞莱斯蒂娜》中如何表现出她自己的特殊抗议形式（1791），她探索了一种混合形式，将诗歌和叙事融为一体，思考作家和读者如何解释这些形式。史密斯建立了诗人和她的观众的竞争欲望，以抗议一种限制性的文学解释，这种解释支持文学形式的任意分离。相反，史密斯认为，抗议的真正力量可以通过这些形式的混合和一种包含形式复杂性的解释风格来捕捉。