Anderson Triumph of Voice

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54 Felicia Hemans and Romantic Ekphrasis4. The Poetical Works of Felicia Dorothea Hemans (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 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 attention the existence of two markedly different versions of the poem. The one Iconsider here is the much-revised second edition published by Murray whichruns 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 itmore than any thing else I have written' (Chorley, vol. 1, p. 65). In thisvolume, 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 centralevent 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, orwhether their separation was mutually convenient. For more on the life ofthe 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 ofBologna (London: Methuen, 1907); and Fredrika H. Jacobs, 'The Constructionof 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 itscentral paradox, however. On the one hand, the poem offers a radical departurefrom the genre of Romantic ekphrasis by representing a female artist bothcreating and speaking for her artwork; on the other, it consistently qualifiesthe power of the female artist by subordinating her artistry to her governingpassion for the knight who, we are to believe, neither shares her enthusiasmfor art nor returns her love, Rossi creates the artwork for the Roman Knightas a substitute for herself, at once animating and arresting her own artisticaspirations.8. For a more specifically pOlitical reading, see Tricia Lootens, 'Hemans andHome: Victorianism, Feminine "Internal Enemies", and the Domesticationof National Identity', PMLA 109 (1994), pp. 238-53. Lootens argues that 'TheImage in Lava' is 'a particularly powerful example of Hemans's feminineantiwar writing' (p. 246).9. Thomas Babington Macaulay's 'Pompeii' (1819), a Cambridge medal poemHemans may have had in mind, celebrates exactly the kind of fame 'TheImage in Lava' ultimately comes to doubt. In spite of Pompeii's ruined state,Macaulay believes that 'fame shall snatch from time a greener bloom, / Shallspread where'er the Muse has rear'd her throne, / And live renown'd inaccents yet unknown' (Chancellor's Gold Medal Poems, p. 69).

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3The Triumph of Voice in FeliciaHemans's The Forest SanctuaryJohn M. Anderson

He saw nature - he saw books through me; an d never did Iweary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words theeffect of field, tree, town, river .. . impressing by sound on hisear what light could no longer stamp on his eye.!

Like Charlotte Bronte' s Mr Rochester} the Spaniard who narrates FeliciaHemans's epic The Forest Sanctuary (1825) is the male creature of a femalecreator, who sees nature and books indirectly, by way of the female voice.The blind Mr Rochester, disoriented by the loss of visual references, isdependent upon Jane's living voice; Hemans's Spaniard, essentially solitaryin a foreign wilderness, depends for hi s orientation upon remembered,mostly female, voices. In The Forest Sanctuary, her most ambitious workand her professed favorite, Hemans herself may help to make straight theway for the current recovery of female voices, for she has constructed ahaunting parable about the power of'voices, about the importance ofremembering them, an d about the hazards and temptations of silence.

Tile Spaniard is the vehicle of both Hemans's voice an d 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 no t one between a consciousIIawakened" or natural voice and the voice of the patriarchy /I out there".Rather, precisely because we all internalize the authoritative voice ofpatriarchy, we must struggle to refashion inherited social discoursesinto words which rearticulate intentions (here feminist ones) other._Jthan normative or disciplinary ones.,3 The Ifeminist dialogics' thatBauer has developed provide a useful critical angle for reading this poem.

On the face of it, The Forest Sanctuary is historical fiction about heroicsuffering - martyrdom, imprisonment, exile - and religious conversion.

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S6 Voice in The Forest SanctuaryThe sixteenthMcentury Spanish gentlemanMsoldier who narrates the storywitnesses his best friends burned at th e stake by the Inquisition. Horrorstricken, he runs to a church where he is comforted an d inspired by astained-glass window and converts to Protestantism. He himself spendstime in prison before taki ng his wife Leonora and their son into exile inthe Americas. Leonora remains Catholic, singing poignant Latin lullabiesto the boy as she wastes away with grief over what she considers herhusband's heresy. She dies on the voyage and is buried at sea. The Spaniardand his son begin a new life in the wilderness.

This is action on a global scale involving themes of massive historicaland cultural importancei there is nothing in such a summary to suggestwhat the poem became as Hemans worked through this material: a ~ p r Q M

J o n g e d , m e c j i t " t i o n o n J h , e , l c j , e a , o i - " o i c ~ This emphasis on voice suggestsdestabilizing alternative approaches to established epiC. If the visualworlds' created by Byron and Wordsworth at times recall the visuallyobsessed Narcissus; Hemans reminds us of the female side of that myth,the other-centered, vocal world of Echo. Her Spaniard is haunted by theinti mate idiosyncrasy of voices in contrast to the detached, universal, an dobjective visual imagery that enjoys such hegemony in the epic tradition.

y o i c e ( f u n d a m e n t a I I Y ~ Q . c i i l L a m l , e ) l ; p r e s s i v e " t r i u m p h a n t l y , d i s p L " c e s . v i s i o n ,.",ithits,'irnp!ications"DLinclividual insight. Remembered and intuitedvoices provide Hemans's S p a n i a r - d ' - - W i f f i ' ~ - t f i e ' - " c o m f o r t and meaning of acommunity - values unavailable from t he isolation of his personal vision.

The suggestive parallels with Jane Eyre inevitably recall the single epicby a nineteenthMcentury woman which has never been forgotten in themeantime. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh an d Jane Eyreare both narrated by their eponymous herOines, both of whom are presentin their stories to the end, bodily as well as vocally. Such characteristicsmake it difficult to overlook the autobiographical content of thesebooks and the importance in them of the figure of the artistic woman.In contrast to this patternl all three of the women in The Forest SanctuarylInezl Theresa, and Leonorl die before its end - destroyed by a religiousconflict Jane and Aurora never need to face. They are therefore unavailableas narrators. Inezl torn between Catholicism and Protestantisml betweenher duties as a sister and as a wifel dies in enigmatic silence; Pr otestantTheresa, the figure of the faithful sister, and Catholic Leonor, the faithfulwife, are each ,,dematerialized into a voice. They are Spanish martyrsllike George Eliot's infant St Theresa at the beginning of Middlemarch,whose 'passionatel ideal nature demanded an epic lifel. In dying fortheir faith, they resemble Joan of Are, bu t t!LSl.lTYLvlngJlLYQkes, .the

C ' J g ~ 1 l 1 l > . 1 ~ " . E J ; h _ ~ whom Donna Landry has usefully described as Ian OvidM

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ian figure for tile ~ l a t i v ~ s . p e . e c h l . . e s s n e s ~ , w ; ~ t h ~ h i c l J we axe cpnfro.nte.d,in -the.f',readYMmadenesslt,,,of languagel_our m p r i s o n m e n t ~ w i t h i n 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 themost important indicator of presence an d instrument of power in herepici Hemans reconfigures this linguistic imprisonment into liberation.IAt the climax to the poem S first Partl Theresa and Alvar, being burnedat the stake, show miraculous endurance and faith by singing togetheras they die. It is a powerful figure for this liberati on of voicesl and herethe narrator himself distinguishes between voices, accordi ng to gender:

Man's voice was there - c l a r i o n ~ v o i c e to cheerIn 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 an d female voices is defined, not inessentialist ter msl bu t in terms of social roles - an important difference,coming from a female poefs male persona. These lines relate the powerof the martyrs' voices to the qualities of poetry. Manis voice has thepower to inspire to war - a visible, active power which, if it is to achievegood, does so by means of destruction. Womanls voice has the far subtlerlless visible power to console the dying, and thus, to achieve its good despitethe triumph of destruction. In the context of their martyrdom, wherethe bodies are constrained and the only action possible is the singingwhich the man and woman do together - where the battle is identicalwith\ the dying - the distinction is reduced to one of audience. Alvarlthe older brother whose faith Theresa has adopted, sings for those whowill 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 theIfeminine sublime' which Anne Mellor has describedl except that Alvarand the Spaniard are themselves the public voices of a more versatilefemale poet. Anyway, Theresa's is the greater part: while her brothersings to the bodies of his audience l she sings to souls.The Spaniardls voice is defined by his role as welli his masculinitylinvisible in his patterns of speech, emerges in the position of power


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58 Voice in The Forest Sanctuaryfrom which he speaks, and in the continued detachment of his mindfrom the condition of his body. His suffering has come too late to alterthis habit of thinking; he consistently maintains a thoroughlydetached, {masculine' mind. This detachment forbids dwelling on thesubject of one's o wn suffering. The physical suffering which the Spaniardhimself undergoes is compressed into a few stanzas at the beginning of thepoem's second Part, when he alludes to his time in prison. The same ma nwho spends so many lines reliving the details of his friends' execution,and even his own feelings upon witnessing it, grows reti cent when hecomes to his personal suffering. The few lines which do express theSpaniard's own sufferings are thus of unusual significance and meritspecial attention. They reveal the comparative spiritual reliability inthis 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 resultof his {spirit's fevered longings', are ushered in by a 'faint, sad sound'. Thissound is his last contact with th e actual; the hallucination involves nosounds 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 comfortto the faithful prisoner - an d this seems supported by the escape tonature that follows.

[Tlhe boundOf my shut cavern seemed dissolved, and IGirt by the solemn hills and burning pomp of sky.

(II.x.7-9)The Spaniard uses apocryphal, Biblical language to encourage such aninterpretation -

a heaven all glowing,Like seas of glass and fire(II.x.3-4)

,-._,-. -.-

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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, an d hers, the mother of my child!(II.x.8-9)

That is the tantalizing climax, and the pleasant vision begins now tofall apart. An idea nudges itself into the Spaniard's consciousness thatthese images have a source in his memory; at the same time, hebecomes aware of the vision's treacherous soundlessness -

as when we stoodLast by that river, and in silence gazedOn 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 isboth literally superficial and often subject to easy challenge by an appeal toother senses. VOices, in contrast, are deep, intimate, similar to thought.Because of this, an d because of atmospheric disturbances and echoes, thesource of a sound is more difficult to pinpoint and may therefore seemmor\e independent of the other senses, no t so easily subject to disproof.The after-effects of the Spaniard's vision of freedom prove that it was noepiphany; it has served only to make imprisonment the more intolerable.He is left in 'unutterable gloom', while the vision 'floated off, the beautiful!' 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)

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60 Voice in The Forest SanctuaryPrayer and weeping, both audible, replace the deceptive vision of happiness with the true voice of sorrow.

The value of voice in The Forest Sanctuary does no t rely upon suchevidence of more profound spiritual truth (or psychological truth - thedifference between these concepts is generally slight in this poem, as inthe classical epics). Voice becomes the foremost assurance of humanpresence and the most effective instrument of human power. 'Thevoices of my home!' the Spaniard cries - II hear them still!' The p a s s i o n ~ate declaration of the line with which The Forest Sanctuary beginscelebrates 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 theidea so invariably throughout the poem that it becomes literalized ineffect. Throughout the poem this opening declaration accumulatesresonance as the speaker again and again identifies presence and evenpersonal essence, a presence something like a soul - in specifically vocalterms.

Mellor's remark that for Hemans 'all female love finally becomesnought but a memorial, the sign of something lost, of something thatno longer exists,6 might have been made with The Forest Sanctuaryin mind. Like the faces in his prison dream, the voices the Spaniardhears are most often an effect of memory. But the voices remainpresent in the mind and can be called forth, while the vision, likea dream, 'floats of f beyond the Spaniard's conscious recall. Therepeated connection of the Spaniard's vocal memories with Imyhome' indicates their emotional content: the voices that possessthe Spaniard belong to the home he continues to own, though hehas left it. These voices (like this home) are no t so much his as he istheirs.Yet he asserts his masculine independence, remembering his journeyinto exile.

Strange heart of man! that e'en midst woe swells highWhen 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)

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Considering what we have known since the poem's beginning aboutthe Spaniard's preoccupation with the past, this is surely a case ofprotesting too much. But he masks the special significance to himselfof this desperate hopefulness by presenting it as universal truth. Sothe masculine pronoun is implicitly generic in this stanza; it becomesemphatically gendered at the beginning of the next, which describesthe very different experience of Leonor upon the same occasion, {Notthus is woman', this stanza begins, and the contrasting female portraitis of course parochial. Her mind does not look forward into theunknown but back to the profoundly known.

Forever would she cling,A brooding dove, to that sale spot of earthWhere 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 andwoman are here ingeniously distinguished as two manifestations of theHoly 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 specificallycorporeal imagery. She is dead, present in the story only as a voice, Buther vocal presence is the essence of presence} and the speaking survivor,who is inspired by (physical, superficial, deceptive) vision ('Wh enthrough the foam he sees'), wishes to ally himself with the incorporealwind. Voice is the necessary sign of presence, even for the {broodingdove' in the Spaniard's vision, clinging to the earthy and erotic: her chilwdren are made present to their mother, from the beginning, no less thanl a t e r , ~ o their father, in the synecdoche of their {sweet voices',7 b i s J d . e . n ~ "tificationoLthe.l[ocaL.and the. actual - presence proveciby voice -repeatedly subjectifies reality by making the tangible ethereal and thusrendering intangible, or potentially imaginary, the_assuredlyactua!.The primary function .of voice is to signal presence. This f u n c t i o n ~ p e r -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 anexclusively human quality. Its absence means the absence of humanity,without which nature, though still imaginable - and even luminouslyvisible - is, like Keats's urn, disturbingly 'silent},


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62 Voice in The Forest SanctuaryBut 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 voicevvith presence that occurs at central, thematically important moments, aswhen the Spaniard 'yearned to hear [Alvar's] voice once more!' (I.liv.6).Here, Alvar is visibly present; the Spaniard, having first expressed astonished incredulity ('and did I gaze on thee?' [l.xxii.9]), then echoes thelanguage of the poem's opening line, as if to justify sight as an indicator ofpresence by means of a syntactical parallel with the already-establishedvoice: 'I see it still - the lofty mien thou borest!' (l.xxiv.I). Again, thisanxious appeal to the visual is characteristic of the Spaniard in momentsof stress; nevertheless, such presence remains insufficient. The Spaniardneeds to hear Alvar's voice to be assured of his full presence.IIHemans repeatedly uses the word voice still more specifically, to signal apresence which is unexpected and redeeming. Thus it is the voice of Inez'sfriend, giving meaning to a hurried confus ion of sights and sounds, whichannounces his arrival to save her. .

And a wild voice cried 'Inez!' Swift she flungThe 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 beingthe only direct speech (as opposed to song) the Spaniard quotes in thepoem - 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 truerone: the 'image' of Inez which he, like the poem's narrator (in whose

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voice his own is nested) has 'borne .. . o'er the sea'. This 'image' is reinforced and justified by a more powerful appeal - he has also borne thestill surer sign of her presence, 'Thy soft voice in my soul'. And hepleads with her now to confirm his belief with her present VOice, andthus 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 meanthat the beloved is generously offering himself - or alternatively, selfishlyoffering his own needsB - as sufficient reason for Inez to avoid martyrdom;but they may underscore the in tense subjectivity that is always a conditionof the voice-as-presence trope: if Inez speaks, she will become a presenceto, achieve recognizable existence in the eyes of, llive for', her beloved.But she does no t do this. Instead, torn between conflicting imperatives,Inez dies - in silence.Her death, like Romantic suicides from Werther on, carries its ownmessage. Dale Bauer, in her argument for a 'feminist dialogics', hascharacterized suicide as a Inarrative strategy', because Ithe death must beaddressed by the other characters'. In fact, Bauer interprets 'the suicidalsignature' as 'a dedsion not to let others finalize or deaden one's characterby monologism', and points out that 'suidde forces t he others to enter intoa dialogic relation with the one to whom such a relation was denied inlife' (pp. 174-5, n. 9). Inez communicates negatively, by dying, byabsence. She is the purest example of the poem's dialogic silence. Hersilence kills her; her vocal absence is translated into a spiritual absence.

Hemans's establishment of voice as the definitive sign of presenceelevates the voices the Spaniard hears in the wilderness into proofs ofthe speakers' vital presence. These speakers 'refuse', in Bauer's formulation, 'to be silent bearers of meaning, but have not yet been acceptedas makers of meaning'. Such a refusal 'initiates the battle among voices'in which 'there are no interpretive communities willing to listen towom\en's alien and threat ening discourse' (p. 3). The presence establishedby voice is the literary sleight of hand by which this woman poet eternizes the poem's female voices (thus making possible the triumph ofthis I ali.en and threatening discourse'). The same device is especiallyimportant 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 thatechoes throughout. The Spaniard, in summary, speaks simply of 'Himwhose voice we hear' (II.lxxv.9). The voice of God is identified with Hispower throughout the Bible, from the fiat of Genesis onward. God'svoice in The Forest Sanctuary thus assures the second, fun,ctiop',g.f.,yoicein the 12Q.e.ffi,_as...anjnstrument of power. '...---- ._----'"_., ._'----------.--'"_ . ,-

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64 Voice in The Forest SanctuaryVoice 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 knownOn him the shedder!

(I.xlvii .9-xlviii. 3)This is voice as a metaphor for the power of divine justice. The mere factof suffering assures consolation and retribution, but the sight of the wrongis insufficient: the blood of the sufferer must be given a metaphoricalvoice, which attracts heaven's attention to injustice and thereby callsdown the forces of justice.Examples of the power of poetical, metaphorical voice, recur - as inthe first stanza of Part Second, when the Spaniard, like an epic poet,invokes breeze, river, an d lake like so many muses. He calls upon themto surround him with a supportive chorus.

Send voices through the forest aisles, an d makeGlad 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 givehis 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 - notablywhen the Spaniard (just escaped, sadly altered, from prison) confrontshis unsuspecti ng wife.

Her glance met mine - I could no t speak - she startedWith 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 knownFirst from all else, and swiftest to restoreLove's buried images.

(II.xxvi.l-xxvii.4)

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The voice reveals divine properties as well. Glances and gazes onlyIbewilder'; the voice speaks to the heart. It resurrects ILove's buriedimages'. Though it strikes like lightning, it rema ins unchanged, despitethe symptoms of mortality that strike 'all else'. The Spaniard's happyrecollection of reunification - a joyful parallel to the tragic moment inwhich Inez hears her lover call her name - is th e poem's most overtstatement of the psychological pow er of voice.

At times this psychological power pretends to a still greater, spiritualpower, a power to work miracles. This greater power remains latent inthe scene in which the Spaniard apostrophizes those buried in thechurch.

For thick ye girt me round, ye long departed!Dust - imaged forms - with cross, an d shield, and crest;It seemed as if your ashes would have startedHad a wild voice burst forth above your rest!

(I.lxxix.1-4 )Again, the distinction is between th e visual and the vocaL The Spaniard'sphrase lim aged forms' recalls th e precedents of two Biblical prohibiti ons- the Old Testament command against Igraven images' an d perhapsalso the New Testament warning concerning the murderous letteragainst th e life-giving spirit. Calling up spirits is precisely the use towhich the Spaniard comes to pu t the power of his voice - when henarrates the body of Hemans's poem. What he here sees as temptationhas become, by th e time of the poem's present, what might be called avocation.Voice is indeed an instrument of miracle when Christ calms the seasin the stained-glass window with which the first Part of the poemcomes\ to a close, though in the window the miracle is bu t art.The Spaniard's imagination vivifies the silent art of the stained glass(ironically restoring the tumult which Christ continually stills). Heaccomplishes this, his role in the artistic experience, c h a r a c t e r i s t i ~ a l l y -by restoring the essential element of voice. So central is voice to thepoem's concept of art that it is here made both the instrumentby which the Spaniard revives the picture's action, an d the instrumentby which Christ calms it again. 9 This Biblical miracle shows a voicewhose power over physical reality is literal, though the Spaniard'senlightened, Protestant (post-Alvar) reading renders its meaningpsychological:


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66 Voice in The Forest Sanctuary.. . my heart grew hushed before Thee,

Sinking with all its passions, as the gustSank at th y voice, along the billowy way.(I.lxxxvL6-8)

The heart, literally subject to th e influence of voice, is figured allegoricallyby the sea. With the full partici pation of the observer, th e artistic miracleof the stained glass is transfigured into the actual miracle of the Spaniard'sconversion experience - and finally into the further artistic miracle ofhis narration.

The climactic stanza of the poem's first Part, where Alvar an d Theresaare executed, shows all three aspects of the voice as power. The first ofthese is th e 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 th e poem, bu t here heguesses wrong. The martyrs' vocal power transcends this psychologicalaspect, miraculously affecting the physical:

I heard a sweet and solemnbreathing strainPiercing the flame, untremulous an d clear!

(I.lxx.3-4)These lines are followed by the poetiC distinction between man's voiceand woman's which we have already considered. This artistic aspect oftheir song is closely allied with its essential spirituality:

Alvar! Theresa! - what is deep? what strong?_ God's breath within the soul! It filled that songFrom your victorious voices!

(I.lxxLS-7)Voice, in th e Petrarchan tradition of the eternizing song, as well as inth e Biblical tradition of the divine Word, is the essence of profundity andstrength, and 'God's voice' is not only 'within the soul' but is practicallyindistinguishable from it.

John M. Anderson 67II IThe Spaniard quite consciously believes that God's word inhabits thewilderness which surrounds him. Near th e beginning of th e poem, hesums up the meaning which he has derived from the experiences he isabout to relate! and he does it in terms of presence an d voices.

Is it not much that I may worship HimWith naught my spirit's breathings to control,And feel His presence in the vast and dim,And whispery woods, where dying thunders rollFrom th e far cataracts? Shall I no t rejoiceThat I have learned at last to know His voiceFrom 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 thevoice of God - His presence. The echoing voice in this stanza rhymes asprominently as Hemans's chosen form allows - in th e couplet at th ecenter of the stanza's form - an d resounds again in the middle of thefollowing line. The Spaniard presents his recognition of this voice as hisachievementi 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 theSpaniard implies a complex connection between silence and duty! speechand sin. Bauer acknowledges a similar hazard in her feminist dialogics:IThe notion of internal polemics is a dangerous on e for feminism inthat it seems to argue for nonspeech or silence' (p. 5). Hemans!s Spaniardreveals th e compelling power of speech in the numerous passages inwhicl). he describes what can only be called temptations to speak. MaryPoovey cites a conduct book: 'Modesty .. . will naturally dispose you tobe rather silent in company .. . [But] one may take a share in conversationwithout uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shews it!and never escapes an observing eye. dO This advice, denying voice andemphasizing the eye and the visible expresses cultural pressures againstwhich The Forest Sanctuary was written. Poovey further quotes HannahMore's remark that Ian illuminated countenance may prove that [awoman] understands [a subjectL almost as unequivocally as languageitself' (p. 24). And Claudia]ohnson discusses the difficulty of representinga heroine whose virtue is silence, using the example of Hannah More's

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68 Voice in The Forest SanctuaryCoelebs in Search of a Wife. 'How', she asks, 'can More as a novelistpraise .. . a modest and feminine ambition precisely to have none, to gounnoti ced? Coelebs tries - IIHow modestly flattering her manner .. . Howintelligent her silence! How well-bred her attention'" - but, Johnsonconcludes, (silence so unbroken cannot be distinguished from insipidnessor imbecility. II I Hemans creates a sympathetic representative for thisfeminine ambition - and gives her a life out of Romance; yet Inezremains a shadowy figure, a cautionary example to the poem's twoheroines, because she dies in silence rather than in singing.Towards the beginning of The Forest Sanctuary - when the eventswhich make up its plot have no t yet been narrated, though they havealready been witnessed and experienced by the Spaniard - the musingfather 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 o f silence is here overwhelmed by the psychologicalnecessity of speech. In the explosive consequences of its repression,speech comes to resemble sexual desire. Hemans underscores this sexualelement in the Spaniard's narrati on o f Theresa's call to religious witness:

But the dark hours wring forth the hidden mightWhich hath lain bedded in the silent soul,A treasure all undreamt of .. .

* * *. . . I t seemed as if her ,breastHad hoarded energies, till then suppressedAlmost with pain, an d 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 implications: sexual oppression is of a piece with such silenCing.

In the refuge of the church, th e Spaniard undergoes ano ther temptationto speak. He feels within himself the life his friends have lost, a lifewhich is defined as a voice. In the midst of the dead it gives him a feelingthat he is uniquely passionate an d powerful - as if his voice, like that of

John M. Anderson 69

Christ, could bring the voiceless dead to life, The lines are evidence ofthe institutional nature of this oppressive silence.

1could have poured out words, on that pale air,To make your proud tombs ring. No, no! I could no t 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 i l d e r ~ness. In prison he feels the urgent desire to testify, feels it unnatural tosuppress his speech:

It is a weary and a bitter taskBack from the lip the burning word to keep.

(Il.v.1-2)Nevertheless, like Theresa, he keeps his thought a 'buried treasure'. Likehers, his experience is tinged with sexual power, as he undergoes literaltorture to speak. The very process of torture makes

e'en of thoughtA burie d treasure, which may but be soughtWhen shadows are abroad - an d night - an d sleep.

(II.v.5-7)Finally, his defense o f his chaste silence leads to a rejection like death:

I might no t brook it long - and thus was thrownInto that r a v e ~ l i k e cell, to wither there alone.

(1I.v.S-9)His virtuous silence ultimately gives way to powerful speech, in thespeaking out of the poem itself. II am here', the Spaniard says nearthe end,

Living again through all my life's farewells,In these vast woods! whe re farewell ne!er was spoken.

(II.lxxiv.8-9)

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70 Voice in The Forest SanctuaryHis silence makes the Spaniard seem desperately feminine in the

helpless, passive defense of virtue which reaps such bitter rewardsiwhen the torture scene is again alluded to later in the poem, with thescale shifted from the social to the personal, it is Leonor who mustremain silent about her faith. The Spaniard, his masculinity restored, isable to divine Leonor's secret despite her heroic silence, through silentinterrogation. He resorts, that is, to the treacherous means no t of voicebu t 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 Spaniardhas himself undergone, but he ignores the parallel, driven to pursue theinterrogation. Even when Leonor speaks, her husband translates thesound 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 beneathThence 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 heardBroke 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 - aweakness traceable ironical.ly to its comparative clarity, its lack ofambiguity. The visual is for the same reason unforgiving to those wh ohave once committed themselves to it. The Spaniard's interrogation hasrevealed the truth he did no t want to discover - of his own damnationin the eyes of his wife. Wishing to delude himself about Leonor's comRing death, he nevertheless cannot fail to understand the 'language' ofher 'looks an d accents'. He generalizes from Leonor to all those he calls'our loved an d loving':

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John M. Anderson 71

Their looks an d accentsHave been a language of familiar toneToo long to breathe, at last, dark sayings an d unknown.

(Il.xxxv.8-9)

Having elevated voice to such importance that he equates his ownspeech with sinfulness, Hemans's narrator begins to pu t theory intopractice, to resist the temptation to narration. As The Forest Sanctuaryprogresses, examples accumulate of the Spaniard refusing to narrate. Herefuses, for exa mple, to discuss his escape from prison.

It is no tale,Even midst thy shades, thou wilderness! to tell.I would no t have my boy's young cheek made pale,Nor haunt his sunny rest with what befellIn 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 whenthe Spaniard refuses to reveal his emotions upon his wife's burial a t sea:

I will no t speak of woe; I may no t tell -Friend tells no t such to friends - the thoughts which rentMy fainting spirit.

(Il.lxiii.1-3)This is the single moment in the poem when th e reading audience ispositively characterized, and the Spaniard tells us who we are - no t hiscritics or his readersi not even, in his usual Biblical idiom, his neighbors,bu t his friends - in order to justify his own silence.

Yet this same narrator - who maintains such sepulchral silencearound the physical an d emotional climaxes of the story he is engagedin telling - bewails the stories he is himself banned from hearing - andparticularly 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,

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72 Voice in The Forest SanctuarySome 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 traditional image of the spirit, breath, dismissing it as mortal if it is not vocal:

Their passionate adieuWas it but breath, to perish?

(lI.lxvi,7-8)This variation of the story of Doubting Thomas replaces the apostle'sdemand to see and touch with the Spaniard's characteristic demand fora voice. He hears no voice, bu t consoles himself by recalling Christ'sdictum (spoken to Thomas): 'Blessed are those who have no t seen, an dyet believe:

Holier trustBe mine! Thy love is there, bu t purified from dust!

(Il.Ixvi,8-9)The Spaniard wants to believe in Leonor's continuing love, bu t he findssuch belief difficult. By contrast, the presence and power of her stillechoing voice, an d those of Alvar and Theresa, are the facts upon whichThe Forest Sanctuary is founded.Hemans's narrator - tempted by silence - cries in the wilderness, yethe is surrounded by, even pervaded by voices - of God, of his home, ofhis past, of the dead. These v o i ~ e s are for him the sufficient proofs ofcomforting presence an d consoling power. To readers of the poem thesesame voices make up his voice. They are the signs of the continuingpresence and power of silenced, often female voices, which reverberateeven 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 no t only "feminine li poetry (whichunder the circumstances can be no imputation, rather an encomium)but also IIfemale" poetry: besides exhibiting the fineness an d charm ofwomanhood} it has the monotone of mere sex.'IZ Hemans's epic, itselflong silent} is certainly 'feminine' poetry, in that it participates, confidently and innovatively, in the tradition of epics by women which weare only b ~ g i n n i n g to rediscover; bu t The Forest Sanctuary is a counter

John M. Anderson 73argument to Rossetti's summary of Hemans's 'weak points'. In it shecommits her own poetic identity to the voice of her masculine Spaniard, whose voice is very far from 'monotone'. It is in itself a chorus ofmale and female, dead an d living voices together, dialogically creatingworlds for those who have ears to hear.Notes an d References

1. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York: Norton, 1971),p.397.

2. He is haunted by her brot her Alvar, too, of course - but even Alvar is ratherfeminized: the Spaniard remembers him most clearly not as his fellowsoldier but as his nurse - I Alvar bending o'er me - from the n ight I Coveringme 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 begiven parenthetically in the text.4. Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 63.5. My text for The Forest Sanctuary is Felicia Hemans, The Forest Sanctuary: andOther Poems (London: ]. Murray, 1825). This text has been reprinted in afacsimile edition, with an in troductio n by Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland, 1978). The poem is divided into two books, each made up of nine-linestanzas numbered with Roman numerals; the lines are not numberedconsecutively in any edition I have seen. I will use this somewhat cumbersomenumbering 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 parentheticall y in the text.7. Like Lady Macbeth, Leonor has an indistinct number of children. The sonwho survives with his father to the end of the story seems to be the onlyone, but here, perhaps for the purposes of the generalization, Lonor's children(like Hemans's) are pluraL8. This more sinister possibility accords better with Marlon Ross's reading of theincident in The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise ofWomen's Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), a reading fundamentally unlike my own. Ross presents Inez as decisively refusing. This isthe way Alvar and Theresa seem to interpret their sister's death - but if theknight did not present an impossibly tempting alternative, Inez would notfall 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 smilingrest I Once morel' (II.lv.2-3).10. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University ofChicago 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: Worthington, 1884), p. 24.

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Anderson Triumph of Voice

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