54 Felicia Hemans and Romantic Ekphrasis

4. The Poetical Works of Felicia Dorothea Hemans (London: Oxford University

Press, 1914), pp. 5 and 43-4. I cite from this edition throughout.
5. I am grateful to Barbara Taylor and Nanora Sweet for bringing to my atten-
tion the existence of two markedly different versions of the poem. The one I
consider here is the much-revised second edition published by Murray which
runs to 518 lines - nearly doubling the length of the first Baxter/Pearson edition
- and adds the significant religious passages and the ekphrasis of Raphael's
'Transfiguration'.
6. Speaking of Records of Woman in a letter to Mary Russell Mitford (23 March
1828), Hemans writes: II have put my heart and individual feelings into it
more than any thing else I have written' (Chorley, vol. 1, p. 65). In this
volume, as Norma Clarke has argued in Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship,
\
Love - The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle (London:
" Routledge, 1990), Hemans continually 'returns to and reworks the central
event in her life as a woman artist: her husband's desertion of her' (80),
though it may never be determined whether he actually deserted her, or
whether their separation was mutually convenient. For more on the life of
the Bolognese sculptor Properzia de Rossi (1490-1530), see Giorgio Vasari,
The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Laura Ragg, The Women Artists of
Bologna (London: Methuen, 1907); and Fredrika H. Jacobs, 'The Construction
of a Life: Madonna Properzia De'Rossi "Schultrice" Bolognese', Word & Image 9
(April-June 1993), pp. 122-32.
7. A recognition ofthe poem's palpable achievement should not blind us to its
central paradox, however. On the one hand, the poem offers a radical departure
from the genre of Romantic ekphrasis by representing a female artist both
creating and speaking for her artwork; on the other, it consistently qualifies
the power of the female artist by subordinating her artistry to her governing
passion for the knight who, we are to believe, neither shares her enthusiasm
for art nor returns her love, Rossi creates the artwork for the Roman Knight
as a substitute for herself, at once animating and arresting her own artistic
aspirations.
8. For a more specifically pOlitical reading, see Tricia Lootens, 'Hemans and
Home: Victorianism, Feminine "Internal Enemies", and the Domestication
of National Identity', PMLA 109 (1994), pp. 238-53. Lootens argues that 'The
Image in Lava' is 'a particularly powerful example of Hemans's feminine
antiwar writing' (p. 246).
9. Thomas Babington Macaulay's 'Pompeii' (1819), a Cambridge medal poem
Hemans may have had in mind, celebrates exactly the kind of fame 'The
Image in Lava' ultimately comes to doubt. In spite of Pompeii's ruined state,
Macaulay believes that 'fame shall snatch from time a greener bloom, / Shall
spread where'er the Muse has rear'd her throne, / And live renown'd in
accents yet unknown' (Chancellor's Gold Medal Poems, p. 69).
~ ' F '
3
The Triumph of Voice in Felicia
Hemans's The Forest Sanctuary
John M. Anderson
He saw nature - he saw books through me; and never did I
weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the
effect of field, tree, town, river ... impressing by sound on his
ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye.!
Like Charlotte Bronte's Mr Rochester} the Spaniard who narrates Felicia
Hemans's epic The Forest Sanctuary (1825) is the male creature of a female
creator, who sees nature and books indirectly, by way of the female voice.
The blind Mr Rochester, disoriented by the loss of visual references, is
dependent upon Jane's living voice; Hemans's Spaniard, essentially solitary
in a foreign wilderness, depends for his orientation upon remembered,
mostly female, voices. In The Forest Sanctuary, her most ambitious work
and her professed favorite, Hemans herself may help to make straight the
way for the current recovery of female voices, for she has constructed a
haunting parable about the power of'voices, about the importance of
remembering them, and about the hazards and temptations of silence.
Tile Spaniard is the vehicle of both Hemans's voice and those of t h ~ . ~ .
dead women who haunt him.2 As such, he may remind us (in Dale \
Bauer's words) that Ithe feminist struggle is not one between a conscious
II awakened" or natural voice and the voice of the patriarchy /I out there".
Rather, precisely because we all internalize the authoritative voice of
patriarchy, we must struggle to refashion inherited social discourses
into words which rearticulate intentions (here feminist ones) other._J
than normative or disciplinary ones.,3 The Ifeminist dialogics' that
Bauer has developed provide a useful critical angle for reading this poem.
On the face of it, The Forest Sanctuary is historical fiction about heroic
suffering - martyrdom, imprisonment, exile - and religious conversion.
55
S6 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary
The sixteenthMcentury Spanish gentlemanMsoldier who narrates the story
witnesses his best friends burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Horror-
stricken, he runs to a church where he is comforted and inspired by a
stained-glass window and converts to Protestantism. He himself spends
time in prison before taking his wife Leonora and their son into exile in
the Americas. Leonora remains Catholic, singing poignant Latin lullabies
to the boy as she wastes away with grief over what she considers her
husband's heresy. She dies on the voyage and is buried at sea. The Spaniard
and his son begin a new life in the wilderness.
This is action on a global scale involving themes of massive historical
and cultural importancei there is nothing in such a summary to suggest
what the poem became as Hemans worked through this material:
This emphasis on voice suggests
destabilizing alternative approaches to established epiC. If the visual
worlds' created by Byron and Wordsworth at times recall the visually-
obsessed Narcissus; Hemans reminds us of the female side of that myth,
the other-centered, vocal world of Echo. Her Spaniard is haunted by the
intimate idiosyncrasy of voices in contrast to the detached, universal, and
objective visual imagery that enjoys such hegemony in the epic tradition.

.",ithits,'irnp!ications"DLinclividual insight. Remembered and intuited
voices provide Hemans's and meaning of a
community - values unavailable from the isolation of his personal vision.
The suggestive parallels with Jane Eyre inevitably recall the single epic
by a nineteenthMcentury woman which has never been forgotten in the
meantime. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Jane Eyre
are both narrated by their eponymous herOines, both of whom are present
in their stories to the end, bodily as well as vocally. Such characteristics
make it difficult to overlook the autobiographical content of these
books and the importance in them of the figure of the artistic woman.
In contrast to this pattern
l
all three of the women in The Forest Sanctuaryl
Inez
l
Theresa, and Leonor
l
die before its end - destroyed by a religious
conflict Jane and Aurora never need to face. They are therefore unavailable
as narrators. Inez
l
torn between Catholicism and Protestantism
l
between
her duties as a sister and as a wife
l
dies in enigmatic silence; Protestant
Theresa, the figure of the faithful sister, and Catholic Leonor, the faithful
wife, are each ,,dematerialized into a voice. They are Spanish martyrsl
like George Eliot's infant St Theresa at the beginning of Middlemarch,
whose 'passionatel ideal nature demanded an epic life
l
. In dying for
their faith, they resemble Joan of Are, but t!LSl.lTYLvlngJlLYQkes, . .the
whom Donna Landry has usefully described as Ian Ovid
M
John M. Anderson S7
ian figure for tile we axe cpnfro.nte.d,
in -the.f',readYMmadenesslt,,,of languagel_our a Ian::
guage that can only opera,gthrougha ,Stl9i.ec\.1:lUt c'!!lnot opgra,tedpy
",a.subject'.', By elevating all that remains of Echo - voice itself - into the
most important indicator of presence and instrument of power in her
epic
i
Hemans reconfigures this linguistic imprisonment into liberation.
I
At the climax to the poem IS first Part
l
Theresa and Alvar, being burned
at the stake, show miraculous endurance and faith by singing together
as they die. It is a powerful figure for this liberation of voicesl and here
the narrator himself distinguishes between voices, according to gender:
Man's voice was there - to cheer
In the midMbattle - ay, to turn the flyingi
Woman's - that might have sung of heaven beside the dying.
(I.lxx.7-9)'
Yet this distinction between male and female voices is defined, not in
essentialist terms
l
but in terms of social roles - an important difference,
coming from a female poefs male persona. These lines relate the power
of the martyrs' voices to the qualities of poetry. Manis voice has the
power to inspire to war - a visible, active power which, if it is to achieve
good, does so by means of destruction. Womanls voice has the far subtlerl
less visible power to console the dying, and thus, to achieve its good despite
the triumph of destruction. In the context of their martyrdom, where
the bodies are constrained and the only action possible is the singing
which the man and woman do together - where the battle is identical
with\ the dying - the distinction is reduced to one of audience. Alvarl
the older brother whose faith Theresa has adopted, sings for those who
will live to carryon the battle; Theresa sings for those who are dying,
namelYI herself and her brother. His audience is publiCi hers, domestic.
This image of Theresa dying for others is consistent with the idea of the
Ifeminine sublime' which Anne Mellor has described
l
except that Alvar
and the Spaniard are themselves the public voices of a more versatile
female poet. Anyway, Theresa's is the greater part: while her brother
sings to the bodies of his audience
l
she sings to souls.
The Spaniardls voice is defined by his role as welli his masculinityl
invisible in his patterns of speech, emerges in the position of power
~
58 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary
from which he speaks, and in the continued detachment of his mind
from the condition of his body. His suffering has come too late to alter
this habit of thinking; he consistently maintains a thoroughly
detached, {masculine' mind. This detachment forbids dwelling on the
subject of one's own suffering. The physical suffering which the Spaniard
himself undergoes is compressed into a few stanzas at the beginning of the
poem's second Part, when he alludes to his time in prison. The same man
who spends so many lines reliving the details of his friends' execution,
and even his own feelings upon witnessing it, grows reticent when he
comes to his personal suffering. The few lines which do express the
Spaniard's own sufferings are thus of unusual significance and merit
special attention. They reveal the comparative spiritual reliability in
this poem of voices as contrasted with visions.
The Spaniard conveys the physical suffering of his captivity indirectly,
by means of an entrancing dream of freedom. His hallucinations, the result
of his {spirit's fevered longings', are ushered in by a 'faint, sad sound'. This
sound is his last contact with the actual; the hallucination involves no
sounds at all. A purely visual experience, the delusion comes on gradually.
Yesl kindling, spreading, brightening, hue by hue,
Like stars from midnight, through the gloom, it grew,
That haunt of youth, hope, manhood!
(II.x.S-7)
These images, powerful in the Spaniard's idiom, promise an affirming,
benign, hopeful vision - perhaps a divine epiphany, a message of comfort
to the faithful prisoner - and this seems supported by the escape to
nature that follows.
[Tlhe bound
Of my shut cavern seemed dissolved, and I
Girt by the solemn hills and burning pomp of sky.
(II.x.7-9)
The Spaniard uses apocryphal, Biblical language to encourage such an
interpretation -
a heaven all glowing,
Like seas of glass and fire
(II.x.3-4)
,-._,- .. -.-
John M. Anderson 59
This vision is succeeded by another archetype, Mother and Child:
And midst the scene - oh! more than all - there smiled
My child's fair face, and hers, the mother of my child!
(II.x.8-9)
That is the tantalizing climax, and the pleasant vision begins now to
fall apart. An idea nudges itself into the Spaniard's consciousness that
these images have a source in his memory; at the same time, he
becomes aware of the vision's treacherous soundlessness -
as when we stood
Last by that river, and in silence gazed
On the rich world of sunset.
Finally, the emotions awakened by the vision drive it away:
But a flood
Of sudden tenderness my soul oppressed;
And I rushed forward, with a yearning breast,
To clasp - alas! a vision!
(II.xii.2-4)
(1I.xii. 4-7)
It was only a Vision, a phantasm, a product of imagination. The visible is
both literally superficial and often subject to easy challenge by an appeal to
other senses. VOices, in contrast, are deep, intimate, similar to thought.
Because of this, and because of atmospheric disturbances and echoes, the
source of a sound is more difficult to pinpoint and may therefore seem
mor\e independent of the other senses, not so easily subject to disproof.
The after-effects of the Spaniard's vision of freedom prove that it was no
epiphany; it has served only to make imprisonment the more intolerable.
He is left in 'unutterable gloom', while the vision 'floated off, the beau-
tiful!' and thus,
I lay down, sick with passion's vain excess,
And prayed to die. How oft would sorrow weep
Her weariness to death, if he might come like sleep!
(II.xiii.1-3,S-9)
I
I
ii
j!
W
1. ..
:'
Ii:
1
.,1.. ,1.1 ....
1
If I
i
1 ~
I
I
,Ii
.1" :11
60 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary
Prayer and weeping, both audible, replace the deceptive vision of happi-
ness with the true voice of sorrow.
The value of voice in The Forest Sanctuary does not rely upon such
evidence of more profound spiritual truth (or psychological truth - the
difference between these concepts is generally slight in this poem, as in
the classical epics). Voice becomes the foremost assurance of human
presence and the most effective instrument of human power. 'The
voices of my home!' the Spaniard cries - II hear them still!' The
ate declaration of the line with which The Forest Sanctuary begins
celebrates the triumph of psychological presence over physical absence.
A Protestant embracing the linguistic while renouncing the mystical,
the Spaniard's cannot mean these words literally, but he repeats the
idea so invariably throughout the poem that it becomes literalized in
effect. Throughout the poem this opening declaration accumulates
resonance as the speaker again and again identifies presence and even
personal essence, a presence something like a soul - in specifically vocal
terms.
Mellor's remark that for Hemans 'all female love finally becomes
nought but a memorial, the sign of something lost, of something that
no longer exists,6 might have been made with The Forest Sanctuary
in mind. Like the faces in his prison dream, the voices the Spaniard
hears are most often an effect of memory. But the voices remain
present in the mind and can be called forth, while the vision, like
a dream, 'floats off beyond the Spaniard's conscious recall. The
repeated connection of the Spaniard's vocal memories with Imy
home' indicates their emotional content: the voices that possess
the Spaniard belong to the home he continues to own, though he
has left it. These voices (like this home) are not so much his as he is
theirs.
Yet he asserts his masculine independence, remembering his journey
into exile.
Strange heart of man! that e'en midst woe swells high
When through the foam he sees his proud bark sweep,
Yes! it swells high, whate'er he leaves behind,
His spirit rises with the rising wind;
For, wedded to the far futurity,
On, on, it bears him ever.
(Il.xxxii.2-3,6-9)

John M. Anderson 61
Considering what we have known since the poem's beginning about
the Spaniard's preoccupation with the past, this is surely a case of
protesting too much. But he masks the special significance to himself
of this desperate hopefulness by presenting it as universal truth. So
the masculine pronoun is implicitly generic in this stanza; it becomes
emphatically gendered at the beginning of the next, which describes
the very different experience of Leonor upon the same occasion, {Not
thus is woman', this stanza begins, and the contrasting female portrait
is of course parochial. Her mind does not look forward into the
unknown but back to the profoundly known.
Forever would she cling,
A brooding dove, to that sale spot of earth
Where she hath loved, and given her children birth,
And heard their first sweet voices.
(Il.xxxiii.4-7)
In Hemans's characteristically Biblical fashion, the spirits of man and
woman are here ingeniously distinguished as two manifestations of the
Holy Spirit: the wind (masculine, incorporeal) and the dove (feminine,
corporeal). But in fact the Spaniard is {wedded' not, as he wants to claim,
to 'futurity}, but to Leonor, the mother who is here evoked in specifically
corporeal imagery. She is dead, present in the story only as a voice, But
her vocal presence is the essence of presence} and the speaking survivor,
who is inspired by (physical, superficial, deceptive) vision ('When
through the foam he sees'), wishes to ally himself with the incorporeal
wind. Voice is the necessary sign of presence, even for the {brooding
dove' in the Spaniard's vision, clinging to the earthy and erotic: her chil
w
dren are made present to their mother, from the beginning, no less than
their father, in the synecdoche of their {sweet voices',7
tificationoLthe.l[ocaL.and the. actual - presence proveciby voice -
repeatedly subjectifies reality by making the tangible ethereal and thus
rendering intangible, or potentially imaginary, the_assuredlyactua!.
The primary function .. of voice is to signal presence. This
vades even the casual details} as when 'the peasant's voice was gone'
from the field, because he has gone to town to witness the Auto da Fe
(I.xiii,4). In this case, the VOice, like the soul, is considered to be an
exclusively human quality. Its absence means the absence of humanity,
without which nature, though still imaginable - and even luminously
visible - is, like Keats's urn, disturbingly 'silent},
62 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary
But there was silence one bright, golden day,
Through my own pine-hung mountains. Clear, yet lone,
In the rich autumn light the vineyards lay,
And from the fields the peasant's voice was gone;
And the red grapes untrodden strewed the ground;
And the free flocks, untended, roamed around.
Where was the pastor? - where the pipe's wild tone?
Music and mirth were hushed the hills among,
While to the city's gates each hamlet poured its throng.
(l.xiii.1-9)
Such a passing detail prepares the reader to accept the equation of voice
vvith presence that occurs at central, thematically important moments, as
when the Spaniard 'yearned to hear [Alvar's] voice once more!' (I.liv.6).
Here, Alvar is visibly present; the Spaniard, having first expressed aston-
ished incredulity ('and did I gaze on thee?' [l.xxii.9]), then echoes the
language of the poem's opening line, as if to justify sight as an indicator of
presence by means of a syntactical parallel with the already-established
voice: 'I see it still - the lofty mien thou borest!' (l.xxiv.I). Again, this
anxious appeal to the visual is characteristic of the Spaniard in moments
of stress; nevertheless, such presence remains insufficient. The Spaniard
needs to hear Alvar's voice to be assured of his full presence.
II
Hemans repeatedly uses the word voice still more specifically, to signal a
presence which is unexpected and redeeming. Thus it is the voice of Inez's
friend, giving meaning to a hurried confusion of sights and sounds, which
announces his arrival to save her. .
And a wild voice cried 'Inez!' Swift she flung
The mantle from her face, and gazed around"
With a faint shriek at that familiar sound.
(I.lv.4-6)
The words 'of Inez's rescuing knight gain much significance from being
the only direct speech (as opposed to song) the Spaniard quotes in the
poem - with the exception of Leonor's dying words. He seeks to 'woo'
Inez 'back to life' by dismissing her religious 'visions' in favor of a truer
one: the 'image' of Inez which he, like the poem's narrator (in whose
-
John M. Anderson 63
voice his own is nested) has 'borne ... o'er the sea'. This 'image' is rein-
forced and justified by a more powerful appeal - he has also borne the
still surer sign of her presence, 'Thy soft voice in my soul'. And he
pleads with her now to confirm his belief with her present VOice, and
thus to gain an existence as full as that which he has carried with him.
'Speak!' he cries 'Oh! yet live for me!' (I.lx.1-3, 8-9).
Those last words are ambiguous: they may be understood to mean
that the beloved is generously offering himself - or alternatively, selfishly
offering his own needs
B
- as sufficient reason for Inez to avoid martyrdom;
but they may underscore the intense subjectivity that is always a condition
of the voice-as-presence trope: if Inez speaks, she will become a presence
to, achieve recognizable existence in the eyes of, llive for', her beloved.
But she does not do this. Instead, torn between conflicting imperatives,
Inez dies - in silence.
Her death, like Romantic suicides from Werther on, carries its own
message. Dale Bauer, in her argument for a 'feminist dialogics', has
characterized suicide as a Inarrative strategy', because Ithe death must be
addressed by the other characters'. In fact, Bauer interprets 'the suicidal
signature' as 'a dedsion not to let others finalize or deaden one's character
by monologism', and points out that 'suidde forces the others to enter into
a dialogic relation with the one to whom such a relation was denied in
life' (pp. 174-5, n. 9). Inez communicates negatively, by dying, by
absence. She is the purest example of the poem's dialogic silence. Her
silence kills her; her vocal absence is translated into a spiritual absence.
Hemans's establishment of voice as the definitive sign of presence
elevates the voices the Spaniard hears in the wilderness into proofs of
the speakers' vital presence. These speakers 'refuse', in Bauer's formula-
tion, 'to be silent bearers of meaning, but have not yet been accepted
as makers of meaning'. Such a refusal 'initiates the battle among voices'
in which 'there are no interpretive communities willing to listen to
wom\en's alien and threatening discourse' (p. 3). The presence established
by voice is the literary sleight of hand by which this woman poet eter-
nizes the poem's female voices (thus making possible the triumph of
this I ali.en and threatening discourse'). The same device is especially
important to the Spaniard himself in the case of the (mostly literary)
voice of God - the final voice alluded to in the poem and the one that
echoes throughout. The Spaniard, in summary, speaks simply of 'Him
whose voice we hear' (II.lxxv.9). The voice of God is identified with His
power throughout the Bible, from the fiat of Genesis onward. God's
voice in The Forest Sanctuary thus assures the second, fun,ctiop', g.f.,yoice
in the 12Q.e.ffi,_as...anjnstrument of power. '
...---- ._----'"_., .._'----------.--'"_ .. ,-
I
,
"II
!L
ii
.1
"tj

'I
,
[:
i
Ii
64 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary
Voice has here widely varying degrees of power. The least of these is
perhaps the Biblical metaphor for consequences:
Look down! man brings thee, heaven! his brother's guiltless blood
Hear its voice, hear! - a cry goes up to thee,
From the stained sad; make thou thy judgment known
On him the shedder!
(I.xlvii .9-xl viii. 3)
This is voice as a metaphor for the power of divine justice. The mere fact
of suffering assures consolation and retribution, but the sight of the wrong
is insufficient: the blood of the sufferer must be given a metaphorical
voice, which attracts heaven's attention to injustice and thereby calls
down the forces of justice.
Examples of the power of poetical, metaphorical voice, recur - as in
the first stanza of Part Second, when the Spaniard, like an epic poet,
invokes breeze, river, and lake like so many muses. He calls upon them
to surround him with a supportive chorus.
Send voices through the forest aisles, and make
Glad music round me, that my soul may dare,
Cheered by such tones, to look back on a dungeon's air!
(II.i.l-9)
The Spaniard wants to use nature as Hemans has used culture, to give
his monologue a multiple, vocal frame.
Greater than this poetic power is the psychological power of voice,
illustrated at moments of central stgnificance in the poem - notably
when the Spaniard (just escaped, sadly altered, from prison) confronts
his unsuspecting wife.
Her glance met mine - I could not speak - she started
With a bewildered gaze - until there came
Tears to my burning eyes, and from my lips her name.
She knew me then! I murmured (LeonorJ"
And her heart answered! Oh! the voice is known
First from all else, and swiftest to restore
Love's buried images.
(II.xxvi. l-xxvii.4)
John M. Anderson 6S
The voice reveals divine properties as well. Glances and gazes only
Ibewilder'; the voice speaks to the heart. It resurrects ILove's buried
images'. Though it strikes like lightning, it remains unchanged, despite
the symptoms of mortality that strike 'all else'. The Spaniard's happy
recollection of reunification - a joyful parallel to the tragic moment in
which Inez hears her lover call her name - is the poem's most overt
statement of the psychological power of voice.
At times this psychological power pretends to a still greater, spiritual
power, a power to work miracles. This greater power remains latent in
the scene in which the Spaniard apostrophizes those buried in the
church.
For thick ye girt me round, ye long departed!
Dust - imaged forms - with cross, and shield, and crest;
It seemed as if your ashes would have started
Had a wild voice burst forth above your rest!
(I.lxxix.1-4 )
Again, the distinction is between the visual and the vocaL The Spaniard's
phrase lim aged forms' recalls the precedents of two Biblical prohibitions
- the Old Testament command against Igraven images' and perhaps
also the New Testament warning concerning the murderous letter
against the life-giving spirit. Calling up spirits is precisely the use to
which the Spaniard comes to put the power of his voice - when he
narrates the body of Hemans's poem. What he here sees as temptation
has become, by the time of the poem's present, what might be called a
vocation.
Voice is indeed an instrument of miracle when Christ calms the seas
in the stained-glass window with which the first Part of the poem
comes\ to a close, though in the window the miracle is but art.
The Spaniard's imagination vivifies the silent art of the stained glass
(ironically restoring the tumult which Christ continually stills). He
accomplishes this, his role in the artistic experience,
by restoring the essential element of voice. So central is voice to the
poem's concept of art that it is here made both the instrument
by which the Spaniard revives the picture's action, and the instrument
by which Christ calms it again.
9
This Biblical miracle shows a voice
whose power over physical reality is literal, though the Spaniard's
enlightened, Protestant (post-Alvar) reading renders its meaning
psychological:
66 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary
... my heart grew hushed before Thee,
Sinking with all its passions, as the gust
Sank at thy voice, along the billowy way.
(I.lxxxvL 6-8)
The heart, literally subject to the influence of voice, is figured allegorically
by the sea. With the full participation of the observer, the artistic miracle
of the stained glass is transfigured into the actual miracle of the Spaniard's
conversion experience - and finally into the further artistic miracle of
his narration.
The climactic stanza of the poem's first Part, where Alvar and Theresa
are executed, shows all three aspects of the voice as power. The first of
these is the psychological power:
What heard I then? - a ringing shriek of pain,
Such as forever haunts the tortured ear?
(I.lxx.1-2)
The Spaniard is 'haunted' by voices throughout the poem, but here he
guesses wrong. The martyrs' vocal power transcends this psychological
aspect, miraculously affecting the physical:
I heard a sweet and solemnbreathing strain
Piercing the flame, untremulous and clear!
(I.lxx.3-4)
These lines are followed by the poetiC distinction between man's voice
and woman's which we have already considered. This artistic aspect of
their song is closely allied with its essential spirituality:
Alvar! Theresa! - what is deep? what strong?
_ God's breath within the soul! It filled that song
From your victorious voices!
(I.lxxLS-7)
Voice, in the Petrarchan tradition of the eternizing song, as well as in
the Biblical tradition of the divine Word, is the essence of profundity and
strength, and 'God's voice' is not only 'within the soul' but is practically
indistinguishable from it.
John M. Anderson 67
III
The Spaniard quite consciously believes that God's word inhabits the
wilderness which surrounds him. Near the beginning of the poem, he
sums up the meaning which he has derived from the experiences he is
about to relate! and he does it in terms of presence and voices.
Is it not much that I may worship Him
With naught my spirit's breathings to control,
And feel His presence in the vast and dim,
And whispery woods, where dying thunders roll
From the far cataracts? Shall I not rejoice
That I have learned at last to know His voice
From man's?
(I. vii.1-7)
In the Romantic tradition of the fEolian harp, these 'whispery woods'
and Idying thunders! translate themselves! not into Muses, but into the
voice of God - His presence. The echoing voice in this stanza rhymes as
prominently as Hemans's chosen form allows - in the couplet at the
center of the stanza's form - and resounds again in the middle of the
following line. The Spaniard presents his recognition of this voice as his
achievementi it is in gratitude for this that he reiterates his story.
The Forest Sanctuary presents much evidence that voices are divine.
Their power is still more strongly- expressed in the negative! when the
Spaniard implies a complex connection between silence and duty! speech
and sin. Bauer acknowledges a similar hazard in her feminist dialogics:
IThe notion of internal polemics is a dangerous one for feminism in
that it seems to argue for nonspeech or silence' (p. 5). Hemans!s Spaniard
reveals the compelling power of speech in the numerous passages in
whicl). he describes what can only be called temptations to speak. Mary
Poovey cites a conduct book: 'Modesty ... will naturally dispose you to
be rather silent in company ... [But] one may take a share in conversation
without uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shews it!
and never escapes an observing eye.
dO
This advice, denying voice and
emphasizing the eye and the visible expresses cultural pressures against
which The Forest Sanctuary was written. Poovey further quotes Hannah
More's remark that Ian illuminated countenance may prove that [a
woman] understands [a subjectL almost as unequivocally as language
itself' (p. 24). And Claudia]ohnson discusses the difficulty of representing
a heroine whose virtue is silence, using the example of Hannah More's
~
[:.1 .. :
~ 1
~
m
:W
li
Ii
~ .
il
I
: ~
68 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary
Coelebs in Search of a Wife. 'How', she asks, 'can More as a novelist
praise ... a modest and feminine ambition precisely to have none, to go
unnoticed? Coelebs tries - IIHow modestly flattering her manner ... How
intelligent her silence! How well-bred her attention'" - but, Johnson
concludes, (silence so unbroken cannot be distinguished from insipidness
or imbecility. III Hemans creates a sympathetic representative for this
feminine ambition - and gives her a life out of Romance; yet Inez
remains a shadowy figure, a cautionary example to the poem's two
heroines, because she dies in silence rather than in singing.
Towards the beginning of The Forest Sanctuary - when the events
which make up its plot have not yet been narrated, though they have
already been witnessed and experienced by the Spaniard - the musing
father gives his son this advice:
'Tis well to die and not complain;
Yet there are hours when the charged heart must speak
E'en in the desert's ear to pour itself, or break!
(l.x.7-9)
The theoretical virtue of silence is here overwhelmed by the psychological
necessity of speech. In the explosive consequences of its repression,
speech comes to resemble sexual desire. Hemans underscores this sexual
element in the Spaniard's narration of Theresa's call to religious witness:
But the dark hours wring forth the hidden might
Which hath lain bedded in the silent soul,
A treasure all undreamt of ...
* * *
... It seemed as if her ,breast
Had hoarded energies, till then suppressed
Almost with pain, and bursting from control,
And finding first that hour their pathway free.,
(l.xxxv.1-3,5-S)
This linking of the sexual with the spoken has specific political implica-
tions: sexual oppression is of a piece with such silenCing.
In the refuge of the church, the Spaniard undergoes another temptation
to speak. He feels within himself the life his friends have lost, a life
which is defined as a voice. In the midst of the dead it gives him a feeling
that he is uniquely passionate and powerful - as if his voice, like that of
John M. Anderson 69
Christ, could bring the voiceless dead to life, The lines are evidence of
the institutional nature of this oppressive silence.
1 could have poured out words, on that pale air,
To make your proud tombs ring. No, no! I could not there!
(I.lxxix.S-9)
The Spaniard escapes the oppressive cultural interiors of church, prison,
home - each of which compels silence - into the freedom of the
ness. In prison he feels the urgent desire to testify, feels it unnatural to
suppress his speech:
It is a weary and a bitter task
Back from the lip the burning word to keep.
(Il.v.1-2)
Nevertheless, like Theresa, he keeps his thought a 'buried treasure'. Like
hers, his experience is tinged with sexual power, as he undergoes literal
torture to speak. The very process of torture makes
e'en of thought
A buried treasure, which may but be sought
When shadows are abroad - and night - and sleep.
(II.v.5-7)
Finally, his defense of his chaste silence leads to a rejection like death:
I might not brook it long - and thus was thrown
Into that cell, to wither there alone.
(1I.v.S-9)
His virtuous silence ultimately gives way to powerful speech, in the
speaking out of the poem itself. II am here', the Spaniard says near
the end,
Living again through all my life's farewells,
In these vast woods! where farewell ne!er was spoken.
(II.lxxiv.8-9)

70 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary
His silence makes the Spaniard seem desperately feminine in the
helpless, passive defense of virtue which reaps such bitter rewardsi
when the torture scene is again alluded to later in the poem, with the
scale shifted from the social to the personal, it is Leonor who must
remain silent about her faith. The Spaniard, his masculinity restored, is
able to divine Leonor's secret despite her heroic silence, through silent
interrogation. He resorts, that is, to the treacherous means not of voice
but of vision. He interprets the testimony of
... a glance-
(If thought to sudden watchfulness be stirred)
A flush - a fading of the cheek, perchance.
(Il.xlii.1-3 )
This 'fading of the cheek' resembles the 'withering' which the Spaniard
has himself undergone, but he ignores the parallel, driven to pursue the
interrogation. Even when Leonor speaks, her husband translates the
sound into vision, with dire results reminiscent of the Fall:
A word -less, less - the cadence of a word,
Lets in our gaze the mind's dim vale beneath
Thence to bring haply knowledge fraught with death!
(ll.xlii.4-6)
And through his very insistence on visual metaphors, he condemns himself:
Even thus, what never from thy lip was heard
Broke on my soul. I knew that in thy sight
I stood, howe' er beloved, a recreant from the light.
(ll.xlii.7-9)
Again, the visual has less truth value than the vocal in this poem - a
weakness traceable ironical.ly to its comparative clarity, its lack of
ambiguity. The visual is for the same reason unforgiving to those who
have once committed themselves to it. The Spaniard's interrogation has
revealed the truth he did not want to discover - of his own damnation
in the eyes of his wife. Wishing to delude himself about Leonor's com
R
ing death, he nevertheless cannot fail to understand the 'language' of
her 'looks and accents'. He generalizes from Leonor to all those he calls
'our loved and loving':
-, "7"-
1
John M. Anderson 71
Their looks and accents
Have been a language of familiar tone
Too long to breathe, at last, dark sayings and unknown.
(Il.xxxv.8-9)
Having elevated voice to such importance that he equates his own
speech with sinfulness, Hemans's narrator begins to put theory into
practice, to resist the temptation to narration. As The Forest Sanctuary
progresses, examples accumulate of the Spaniard refusing to narrate. He
refuses, for example, to discuss his escape from prison.
It is no tale,
Even midst thy shades, thou wilderness! to tell.
I would not have my boy's young cheek made pale,
Nor haunt his sunny rest with what befell
In that drear prisonRhouse.
(Il.xiv.1-5)
This fatherly silence creates a crucial absence of physical action in the
second Part at what might have been a high point of sensationalism.
This absence is matched at the high point in the sentimental plot when
the Spaniard refuses to reveal his emotions upon his wife's burial at sea:
I will not speak of woe; I may not tell -
Friend tells not such to friends - the thoughts which rent
My fainting spirit.
(Il.lxiii.1-3)
This is the single moment in the poem when the reading audience is
positively characterized, and the Spaniard tells us who we are - not his
critics or his readersi not even, in his usual Biblical idiom, his neighbors,
but his friends - in order to justify his own silence.
Yet this same narrator - who maintains such sepulchral silence
around the physical and emotional climaxes of the story he is engaged
in telling - bewails the stories he is himself banned from hearing - and
particularly the silence of the dead. To disguise the personal element,
he adopts for a moment the plural pronoun:
... oh! that this we knew,
But this! - that through the silence of the night,
II
w
ff:
II
~ J
~
;1:
II
Ii
['
,
!i
(!
ii'
II!;
'Iii
it
II',
III
'" iii
i"
I
I
l
72 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary
Some voice, of all the lost ones and the true,
Would speak.
(II.lxvi,2-S)
A voice is all the Spaniard requires of a soul. He explicitly revises a tradi-
tional image of the spirit, breath, dismissing it as mortal if it is not vocal:
Their passionate adieu
Was it but breath, to perish?
(lI.lxvi,7-8)
This variation of the story of Doubting Thomas replaces the apostle's
demand to see and touch with the Spaniard's characteristic demand for
a voice. He hears no voice, but consoles himself by recalling Christ's
dictum (spoken to Thomas): 'Blessed are those who have not seen, and
yet believe:
Holier trust
Be mine! Thy love is there, but purified from dust!
(Il.Ixvi,8-9)
The Spaniard wants to believe in Leonor's continuing love, but he finds
such belief difficult. By contrast, the presence and power of her still-
echoing voice, and those of Alvar and Theresa, are the facts upon which
The Forest Sanctuary is founded.
Hemans's narrator - tempted by silence - cries in the wilderness, yet
he is surrounded by, even pervaded by voices - of God, of his home, of
his past, of the dead. These are for him the sufficient proofs of
comforting presence and consoling power. To readers of the poem these
same voices make up his voice. They are the signs of the continuing
presence and power of silenced, often female voices, which reverberate
even in the still isolation of a wilderness exclusively inhabited by men.
'One might sum up the weak pOints in Mrs Hemans's poetry', W. M.
Rossetti wrote, 'by saying that it is not only "feminine
li
poetry (which
under the circumstances can be no imputation, rather an encomium)
but also IIfemale" poetry: besides exhibiting the fineness and charm of
womanhood} it has the monotone of mere sex.'IZ Hemans's epic, itself
long silent} is certainly 'feminine' poetry, in that it participates, confid-
ently and innovatively, in the tradition of epics by women which we
are only to rediscover; but The Forest Sanctuary is a counter
John M. Anderson 73
argument to Rossetti's summary of Hemans's 'weak points'. In it she
commits her own poetic identity to the voice of her masculine Span-
iard, whose voice is very far from 'monotone'. It is in itself a chorus of
male and female, dead and living voices together, dialogically creating
worlds for those who have ears to hear.
Notes and References
1. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: Norton, 1971),
p.397.
2. He is haunted by her brother Alvar, too, of course - but even Alvar is rather
feminized: the Spaniard remembers him most clearly not as his fellow
soldier but as his nurse - I Alvar bending o'er me - from the night I Covering
me with his mantle' (I.xxix.7-8).
3. Dale M. Bauer, Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 4. Further references will be
given parenthetically in the text.
4. Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Brit-
ain, 1739-1796 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 63.
5. My text for The Forest Sanctuary is Felicia Hemans, The Forest Sanctuary: and
Other Poems (London: ]. Murray, 1825). This text has been reprinted in a
facsimile edition, with an introduction by Donald H. Reiman (New York: Gar-
land, 1978). The poem is divided into two books, each made up of nine-line
stanzas numbered with Roman numerals; the lines are not numbered
consecutively in any edition I have seen. I will use this somewhat cumbersome
numbering system throughout, as the most natural and convenient.
6. Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism & Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 132.
Further references will be given parenthetically in the text.
7. Like Lady Macbeth, Leonor has an indistinct number of children. The son
who survives with his father to the end of the story seems to be the only
one, but here, perhaps for the purposes of the generalization, Lonor's children
(like Hemans's) are pluraL
8. This more sinister possibility accords better with Marlon Ross's reading of the
incident in The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of
Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), a reading funda-
mentally unlike my own. Ross presents Inez as decisively refusing. This is
the way Alvar and Theresa seem to interpret their sister's death - but if the
knight did not present an impossibly tempting alternative, Inez would not
fall dead at his feet.
9. Leonor's dying words, among the few spoken words quoted in th.e poem,
repeat this model of artistic soothing: 'And I have lulled him to his smiling
rest I Once morel' (II.lv.2-3).
10. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984), p. 24.
11. Claudia 1. Johnson, lane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 18.
12. 'Prefatory Notice', The Poetical Works Of Mrs. Hemans (New York: Worthing-
ton, 1884), p. 24.
ill,