SOURCE: Introduction to Imagination Transformed: The Evolution of the Female Character in Keats's Poetry, Southern Illinois University Press, 1993, pp. 1-9.

[In the following essay, Alwes surveys Keats 's treatment of women in his poetry, asserting that the female is exploited "not only as an ideal to be achieved but as an obstacle to that achievement. " Alwes states that in Keats's poetry women symbolize the imagination and all it entails, from the joy of creation to the fear over its possible loss.]

A reader of Keats's works cannot help being struck by the abundance of female figures. Every major poem involves at least one feminine character—often more than one—and almost always as the controlling metaphor. She serves alternately as a means of preservation and as an agent of destruction to the poetry's male heroes, the she who must be both embraced and denied in order to acquire masculine identity. As Keats enacts it in his poetry, the power of the female is both primordial and transcendent, and by identifying her with his own often recalcitrant imagination, he exploits the female not only as an ideal to be achieved but as an obstacle to that achievement.

The romantic female persona is a poetic contrivance to her male creator. She is, as Elizabeth Janeway observes of the earliest images of goddesses from the Stone Age, a "fetish," a "lucky piece" for a "desperate man… . to thumb in time of need" (3). Janeway comments that the Stone Age figures have neither faces nor feet, are not characterized as individuals or as women, but portray instead, like the figure of romantic poetry, "man's need for her… . She is the Great Mother, feared and adored, both mediator with and representative of necessity" (3). From the Stone Age to the romantic era and beyond, the woman as symbol is created in order to be the index by which the male measures his identity. She is, as Simone de Beauvoir says, "all that man desires and all that he does not attain" (223). The misogyny that lies behind romantic poetry places the onus of responsibility for the male's creative survival, and thus his creative identity, squarely on the self-representation he derives from the woman as metaphor for both.

Marilyn Gaull remarks that Keats "depicts women either as silly and self-deluded, or as goddesses who preside over painful initiation rites" (222). The silliness and self-delusion, as well as the magnificence of the later goddesses, originate with the development of the creator himself, and it is through the dismissal and acceptance of the successive female figures that Keats personifies the changes that occur with his growth as a poet. From the mortal maidens of 1817 to the omnipotent goddesses of 1819, the females portray the salvation and destruction, passion and fear that the imagination elicits. The "yearning Passion I have for the beautiful" that Keats describes to his brother and sister-in-law (Letters 1:404) is combined, in the later poetry, with a fear of the unknown, especially of the female, and consequently a fear of the new elusive imagination that will delineate her, the product of an increasingly tragic vision of experience.

As symbol of the imagination itself—both creative and errant—Keats's women represent both the joy of creativity and the fear that Keats often felt over its possible loss. More than that of any of his contemporaries, Keats's poetry represents the feminine figure as symbol of the poet's own fears of alienation and loss of masculine (creative) identity. Thus the figures in his works serve as lovers, guides, and nemeses to the male heroes. The portrait that emerges at the end of the collective works is of a supremely androgynous figure who becomes a "close bosom-friend" to the male figure, one who represents both the creator and Apollo, "the maturing sun" ("To Autumn" 2). The journey to this point is dangerously littered with women who taunt and intimidate the male, however, and who are anything but a "friend" to him.

Marlon Ross refers to the "anxious self-consciousness that pervades all Romantic poetry, … the persistent effort of the Romantic poet to find in his own voice an aboriginal self that re-creates the world" ("Romantic Quest" 26). And when men attempt to recreate the world, to reproduce self-meaning in their literature, they must take into account the feminine (and primal) principle of creation. They must either provide for or dismiss the idea of procreativity, symbolized by the adult, or fully evolved, woman, who inspires the man with horror that is "the horror of his own carnal contingence, which he projects upon her" (Beauvoir 167). Strictly speaking, there are no "adult" females in Keats's poetry. He chooses to dismiss the mortal female once she comes of age, and when she is abandoned, her successors are mythologized into the timeless, and thus ageless, figures of goddesses. It is a difficult task to attempt to create constancy through a symbol whose very nature is perceived, by the male, as inconstant, deriving from her status as alien to the male. How to reconcile her creative powers that will ensure his status as poet with those perceived as destructive is the raison d'être behind Keats's greatest works.

Having completed "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "half-finished" "Lamia," Keats tells his friend Benjamin Bailey that he "look[s] upon fine Phrases like a Lover" (Letters 2:139). Through his status as lover to the imagination, the poet may be able to exert better control over the increasingly problematic relationship that develops between himself and his work, certainly apparent in "Lamia," the poem only halffinished in need of a resolution, with the seemingly unresolvable characteristic of a serpent/goddess whose power, Keats facilely asserts, "smote, [yet] still guaranteed to save" (1.399).

For the poet who sees himself as "lover" to the imagination, a natural (and troublesome) correlative of the female as a metaphor of the imagination is the concept of sexuality. Whether mortal or immortal, the relationship between Keats's females and the male personae is frequently characterized by a cluster of sexually connotative terms, such as "enthrall," "entrammel," and "ensnare," which convey the magic and subversive power of the female and give an impression of simultaneous attraction and repulsion on the part of the male—present in both Keats the poet as well as Keats the man, as evidenced by the various letters he wrote that concurrently impugn and elevate the nature of women.¹ The network of metaphors enacts and animates Keats's own relationship with his often contrary imagination that will become, in the crucial odes, his "demon Poesy" ("Ode on Indolence" 30). Nina Auerbach comments that the demonic female figures of literature, traditionally characterized as alien to the male, exude "a power that withers patriarchs … [and] find their greatest triumphs in displacing male authorities" (8). It is thus evidence of masculine survival when the male writer is able to create and subdue the female in her demonic form. Male authority, and the authorship that lies within it, derives its power from his gendered identity and inherent difference from the female. The female muse is distinctly separate from the male writer: while she is the imagination, he is the energy that gives it life, purpose, and, when necessary, limitations.

The female is a convenient symbol for the male imagination precisely because she is traditionally characterized as fragmented into the nine individual Muses and can thus be so easily dehumanized into a "spiritual object" (Gilbert and Gubar 403), while at the same time offering sexual solace to the masculine identity. But "that which is creative must create itself" Keats says of the imagination (Letters 1:374). The object must become the subject, and as Keats journeys from the naive poet of "Imitation of Spenser," a poem that, as its title makes clear, attempts nothing beyond imitation of his male predecessor, to the tragic poet of The Fall of Hyperion, who had watched his eighteen-year-old brother Tom die of the family disease tuberculosis, the poetry's females evolve from the early dormant mortal maidens to the mythic goddesses of the later poetry, with a humanizing power that distances them from their own objectification and reintegrates the nine fragmented voices of the Muses into a whole.

The sexual enthrallment that binds Keats to his creations will change, too, from one of benign attraction to one of inextricable possession, because the female is, by necessity, more than a lover to Keats—she is the gauge of his own search for identity. Multidimensional and mysteriously protean, the females provide a complete portrait of the growth of the imagination, of both the potentialities and the disappointments that the poet discovered in it through them.

Another more traditional figure is central to much of Keats's poetry—the dashing and misogynous Apollo, god of the sun, of poetry, of medicine, and sundry other masculine realms, whose sexual pursuits are legendary. The mythic war between the Titans and the Olympians that constitutes the narrative events of the Hyperion poems is a battle between the archetypally feminine earth and the masculine heaven. With the triumph of the Olympian Apollo as sun god, all feminine power is in danger of being supplanted.

The myths of Apollo that Keats embraced and integrated into his poetry as early as February 1815 ("Ode to Apollo") demonstrate the poet's own conflicting need of and fear of the female. The fears will become impossible to resolve by concentrating solely on the god of the new order of Olympians as metaphor for the imagination, as Keats's early poetry attempts to do,² because the myths of Apollo deny the power, often the very existence even, of the earth goddesses who preceded him. Keats's own need for the maternal goddesses, however, will eventually outweigh his need for Apollo.

Several of the stories about Apollo focus on or allude to his misogynist traits, as he frequently chases down and often causes the death of fleeing mortal women or lesser goddesses. Lemprière's Classical Dictionary, to which Keats himself often turned for knowledge of mythology, notes that Apollo's "amours with [different females] are well known, as are also the various shapes he assumed to gratify his passion" (67). It will be Keats's own creations who assume "various shapes" to gratify their own passion within the poems, an interesting counterpoint to Apollo's description, as noted by Lemprière, which is more androgynous than virile, a fact that Keats certainly would not have ignored: Apollo is "generally represented with long hair, as a tall beardless young man, with a handsome shape, holding in his hand a bow, and sometimes a lyre; his head is generally surrounded with beams of light" (67). Holding a bow and a lyre, two objects of feminine shape and proportion, without the phallic arrow anywhere in sight, and sporting what amounts to a halo, like that which crowns both Madonna and the Christ child, Apollo seems less threatening a figure to women than does Cupid, who is allowed a quiver of arrows. Yet he is mythologized as the androcentric god who replaces feeling with intellect, that is, the feminine with the masculine, and attempts, as the newly born Olympian, to deny the earth's existence altogether, an attempt that will become evident in much of Keats's poetry.³ While his females, in their own progressively frightening shapes will seem like caricatures of Apollo, Keats will imbue the masculine sun god with a passivity, especially apparent in the first Hyperion, that helps produce the final androgynous figure of "To Autumn," an androgyny that will define the figures of both Apollo and the season. After the first great flourish of the sun god in the early poetry, Keats will invoke him only infrequently because the later poetry is directed toward a reconciliation between the violently severed earth and heaven (the outcome of the mythic battle) that goes beyond the Apollonian ideal and into the poet's own realm of salvation—the human heart. The desired reconciliation will degender both earth and heaven by creating the androgyny that will supplant both the frightening female and her vulnerable male prey.

The work in which the male is seen as most vulnerable is "La Belle Dame sans Merci," the startling little poem that serves as both turning point and critical link between an imagination that resides with the feminine earth, which Keats will now eschew, and an imagination that attempts to leave the earth for the Apollonian realm of timelessness. Probably the most controversial of his works, it is one of a handful that is most closely associated with Keats's life and his own sexuality. Not surprisingly, feminist critics have discussed la belle dame as an archetype of the female who knowingly and willingly emasculates the male.⁴ Written in April 1819, after the death of Tom Keats and during the early months of the poet's tragic relationship with Fanny Brawne, the poem apotheosizes a female who while powerful enough to abandon the earth—the poetic goal—is unwilling (or unable) to reconcile the two realms, to repair the schism between the earth of the fallen sun god, Hyperion, and the heaven of his successor, Apollo. She is the symbol and the example of the imagination "brought / Beyond its proper bound, yet still confined,—/ Lost in a sort of Purgatory blind" so that she "cannot refer to any standard law / Of either earth or heaven" (Letters 1:262). "La Belle Dame" is the harbinger of the period of Keats's career most defined by his frightening uncertainty about the imagination.

Her immediate progeny will be the female symbols in the odes of 1819, in which Keats tries to diffuse the destructiveness of the female by splintering her persona into discrete symbols that seem, at first, to convey compassion toward the mortal speaker who seeks possession of their power through union with them. The attempt will ultimately be futile, however, because the female symbols of the odes are still incapable of identifying with the mortal state (the nightingale, for example, has "never known / The weariness, the fever, and the fret" [22-23] of mortality), and these symbols finally become, as "La Belle Dame" had, representatives of an imagination "brought / Beyond its proper bound."

Moneta of The Fall of Hyperion is the final goddess, more powerful than any of her predecessors, to appear in Keats's poetry. Because she understands the power and beauty of both realms, earth and heaven, her power extends even beyond that of Apollo. At the final stage of the development of the female, Moneta combines the wisdom of the Apollonian realm with the compassion of the feminine earth and defines the poet, who will not recognize both realms, as a "dreamer," one who "venoms all his days, / Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve" (1.175-76). Through her reclamation of the power of the maternal female, Moneta transforms the dreamer's identity into that of a poet. The restoration that the dreamer-poet discovers possible in The Fall is fully enacted in the final ode, "To Autumn." The poetic process reaches fruition in exquisite testimony to the season of ripe abundance. In this poem of restoration, all transcendent powers lie in the temporal beauty of the earth. The imagination that had consistently attempted to leave the earth gives the earth itself the suggestion of timelessness, where "summer has o'er-brimm'd" the bees' "clammy cells" (11) and they believe the "warm days will never cease" (10). For the first and only time in the poetry, timelessness becomes a characteristic of earthly beauty, if only to the bees. The figure that presides over this apotheosis, along with the sun, is timeless as well, for it is a figure finally degendered and neutralized into a process of procreation rather than a female who, by virtue of her gender, could be either docile or dominant to the male but never simply equal.

Although many critics have discussed the poetry's females and female symbols, the discussions have generally been tangential to the exegesis of the poetry itself. And even some of the critics who focused on the changing female figure often failed to include the process by which change occurs within the vision of the poet himself. These critics thereby incorrectly (and perhaps a bit patronizingly) concluded that the females of the middle and late poetry are little more than "femmes fatales," an epithet that denies rather than validates the process of change, for it reduces the poet's enthrallment to self-imposed destruction rather than to a relationship expressive of the anxiety with which Keats consistently delineated his imaginative powers.⁵

The female as literary object is, of course, nothing new to writers. Caroline Heilbrun argues, for example, that in creating female personae, women writers are articulating their own pain (72). But the process retraced here is that of a male writer who exploits the female as an object so that he can transcend his fear of her as a symbol of his own creative limitations. Thus the object takes on the characteristics of the subject as Keats creates a dialectic that denies and embraces, in order to, as Ross says, "establish rites of passage toward poetic identity and toward masculine empowerment" ("Romantic Quest" 29). Because romanticism is, as Ross observes, "historically a masculine phenomenon" (29), women, even women writers, "become anchors for the male poets' own pursuit for masculine self possession" (29). Real, flesh and blood women did not particularly interest Keats as poet, but the ideal woman whom he strived for in his poetry to create and possess would, if controlled, ensure his own place among the male romantic poets. For male writers, empowerment is valid only when the specter of the objectified female becoming subject is subverted. The threat of masculine dissolution looms especially large for Keats, whose poetry becomes progressively more androcentric as it delineates and cherishes an ideal female whose origins lie in the perceived paradoxical nature of her gender. Keats can subvert this outcome finally by degendering the female into a figure as androgynous and passive as the diluted Apollo from Hyperion.

Notes

¹ As example of the perceived duality of women that pervades the man as well as the poet, Keats tells his sister-in-law, Georgiana, of Jane Cox, whom he calls a "Charmian": "I should like her to ruin me, and I should like you to save me" (Letters 1:396).

² Contrary to my thesis, Evert contends that Keats made the masculine god (rather than the goddesses) "functionally representative of his own experience and reflection" (38). Donald H. Reiman agrees that Apollo is consistently Keats's metaphor for poetry, and to discount the female even further from the creative process, sees Cynthia/Diana as "the goddess of dreams and sleep, as opposed to imagination and poetry" (666n). In the very early poems, those published in 1817 especially, the masculine Apollo was certainly representative of both poetry and poet to Keats, a reason for his characterizing the females as ineffectual maidens who serve as little more than part of the scenery. But as Keats's personal (rather than conventional) symbol of poetry, Apollo simply did not last as representative of the transformative imagination.

³ The misogyny inherent in both Apollo and Keats will help produce the females that many critics refer to as "femmes fatales," the physical and feminine embodiment of an imagination that attempts desertion of the earth, of replacing the Dionysian principle of beauty with the Apollonian of knowledge.

⁴ Kate Millett claims that Keats "started it all with that fatal woman … who kept her knight hanging about disconsolate and 'palely loitering'" (148).

⁵ The critics who have, in one way or another, come closest to what I am doing are Mario D'Avanzo, who devotes the second chapter to Keats's use of the female as metaphor for the imagination but does not discuss, as I do, the process of evolution from meek to threatening; Barbara Schapiro, who explores la belle dame and Moneta psychoanalytically; Dorothy Van Ghent, who, by virtue of her analysis of myth, gives more than usual attention to the later goddesses; Beth Lau, whose thesis explores the drama of knowledge and sorrow that informs the later goddesses; and the collection of essays that make up Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988), which discuss the search for masculine identity through the feminine.

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