Romantic Couplings - A Special Issue of Romanticism On the Net

While that most famous of Romantic partnerships, between Wordsworth and Coleridge, defines for many readers and scholars the idea of literary collaboration, the conference on Romantic Couplings that took place on 27 March 1999 at the University of Sheffield sought to demystify and to open up the notion of pairing and to explore less well-travelled ground. Starting from the premise that coupling is both tangible and insubstantial, textual and ideological, real and imaginary, the papers delivered at the conference enlarged on the strictures of collaboration provided by the Wordsworth/Coleridge model, both theoretically and in terms of the players. The essays in this special issue follow on from the conference; while Nora Crook's and Jane Hodson's were delivered on the day, Ashley Tauchert's and my own pick up the trail left by the conference participants. All four essays engage with the ramifications of coupling, textually, generically, sexually, and editorially. All four ask readers to see collaboration and pairing as an intimate, exposing process. Where Wordsworth ejected Coleridge from their dyad in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, all the couples here discussed—Mary and Percy Shelley, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Wollstonecraft and Fanny Blood and their fictional counterparts, Della Crusca and Anna Matilda—depend on the continuation of their coupling, on the intermingling of textual production. With the enlarging of the Romantic canon, couples are easier to come by: besides those under investigation here, we might also consider, for instance, Mary Robinson and S.T. Coleridge, or Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, or Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans, or Coleridge and William Lisle Bowles, or John Keats and Mary Tighe, or Byron and Letitia Landon, to name but a few (predominantly opposite-sex) couples. Thematically, many writers during the period mirror and rewrite each other (it is not a coincidence that plagiarism was so widespread at the time). Moreover, as the essays here suggest, many couples also interfere with each other, physically and textually. Words intermingle, bodies touch: textuality supports and encourages conjoining. The essays in this issue revolve around the idea of intercourse, of conversation and interaction, a specifically mutual enterprise. Influence is only part of the project. The hierarchy implied by the influence model—where the 'master' guides and forms the 'pupil'—loses its meaning; partnership, a more fluid modality, replaces dominance. Even as 'old Romanticism' privileged the individual, the solitary genius alone in Nature with his thoughts and his poetry, so too influence presupposes inequality: both assume that there exists a grateful audience, or at least one that will come to be grateful. This conforms to the ideal of the prospect view, a superior stance both visually and socially, as I discuss in my book Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Macmillan, 1998). However, what it leaves out is the possibility of shared fortunes, of cross-influence, of equal footing. Given the French Revolution ideal of égalité, so attractive to so many in the 1790s and later, it is surprising that the dominance model has persisted for so long. What it points out is the contradictory nature of a position like Wordsworth's, whose work has been for so long the template for Romanticism. While Wordsworth may not have been able to reconcile his ideals of equality with his need for authority, it does not necessarily follow that isolation and solipsism underpin the Romantic period. The very ease with which couples can be named suggests that perhaps partnership, in a variety of forms, is more the basis for 'Romanticism'. A new, more collaborative Romanticism chimes, of course, with the current critical and institutional emphasis on interdisciplinarity, an emphasis designed to facilitate the sharing …