Keats Negative Cap

Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats
Author(s): Margaret Homans

Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Fall, 1990), pp. 341-370
Published by: Boston University
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MARGARET HOMANS
Keats Reading Women,

Women Reading Keats
paper began as an inquiry into women readers of Keats and
This the complex resistance?to borrow Judith Fetterley's term?they

may have felt to his representation of them.1 But one can know very
little about, for example, Fanny Brawne's apparent dislike of his dwell
ing on her Beauty, because Keats destroyed all her letters to him, a fact
that, just as as women readers' resistance to Keats,
suggesting interesting
isKeats's resistance towomen readers. Their resistance to him is at least
in part the result of his design to repel their interest and advances, to
resist being read by women readers, not only Fanny Brawne but others
as well. This paper investigates both some real, historical women readers
of Keats, and his construction of women readers as it emerges in a few
of his letters and poems. Keats's views of women more generally, his
reading of contemporary and prior women writers, and readings of
Keats by contemporary and more recent women writers, to say
nothing
of a full rereading of the poems in the light of these concerns, are projects
that I can only touch on here, and for which this paper can constitute
a
only preface.
At first glance, itmight seem that women readers, then and now,
would be especially sympathetic to Keats above the other high roman
tics. His lower-middle-class origins and lack of university education?
he couldn't read Greek and kept getting the pronunciations of classical
names wrong?make him a candidate for honorary membership inVir
ginia Woolf 's "Outsiders' Society."2 Sneered at by his earliest reviewers
for his upwardly mobile poetic aspirations, he was placed by John
Lockhart not only in "The Cockney School of Poetry" but in the com
A shorter version of this essay was presented at the English Institute in August 1986. I
have incorporated many helpful suggestions made by Susan Wolfson and by Gordon
Turnbull, to both of whom I am very grateful.
1. See Judith
Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction
(Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1978).

2. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1938) 106.
SiR, 29 (Fall 1990)
341
342 MARGARET HOMANS
pany of menials and women: "The just celebrity of Robert Burns and
Miss Baillie has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we
know not how many farm-servants and unmarried ladies; our very
footmen compose and there is scarcely a
tragedies, superannuated gov
erness in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behing her in her
band-box."3 Lockhart goes on to describe Keats's career inmedicine and
his apprenticeship to an apothecary and urges him "back to the shop,
Mr. John."
One of Keats's biographers, Sir Sidney Colvin, is baffled by Keats's
lack of noble heredity. In the other chief poets, he writes, we can see
"some strain of power in their blood" or at the very least some expla
nation in the landscape of their youth. But Keats was "born in a dull
and middling walk of London city life. "4 Like Lockhart, Colvin links
gender and class in his account of Keats, although for an opposite
purpose. He seems to have expended great energy in trying, in vain, to
establish a pedigree for Keats, inquiring in parish after parish for records
of the birth of Keats's father. Failing to find these, he works on the
etymology of the name Keats, which, he writes, "may in some cases be
a possessive form derived from the female Christian name Kate, on the
. . . but the source accepted as
analogy of Maggs from Margaret:
...
generally probable for it is theMiddle-English adjective 'kete', a
word of Scandinavian origin meaning bold, gallant" (Colvin 3-4). If
Keats cannot be rescued from his unaccountably low birth, Colvin's
subliminal logic seems to run, he can at least be rescued from itmeto
nymically by rescuing him from the analogous taint of femininity: Keats
does not belong to Kate, he is instead bold, gallant. Whether we look
at Lockhart's of Keats or Colvin's anx
placement among governesses,
iety to distinguish him from them, if gender is a social construct, and

if to be socially powerless is to be "a woman," thenKeats can be classed
among women.
Two more recent readers of Keats, Adrienne Rich and Barbara
Charlesworth Gelpi, make something of the same point about Keats

using different evidence, evidence thatmay however be linked to ques
3. Z[John Gibson Lockhart], "The Cockney School of Poetry," Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine, vol. in, no. xvn, August 1818: 519-24; reprinted in Judith O'Neill, ed., Critics
on Keats: Readings in Literary Criticism (London: George Allen and Un win, 1967) 9.
Similarly, Jane Carlyle compared Keats to a seamstress. For a much fuller account of the
way his early critics classed Keats with women, see Susan Wolfson, "Feminizing Keats,"
manuscript 1987.
4. Sidney Colvin, John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends Critics and Afler-Fame
(London: Macmillan, 1917) 1-2.
KEATS READING WOMEN, WOMEN READING KEATS 343
tions of social power as raised by Colvin and Lockhart. In a transcribed

"conversation" the two women discuss the practice of labelling women's
strengths as weaknesses in patriarchal culture. Rich mentions Nancy
Chodorow's work on the "so-called 'weak ego boundaries' of women,"
which, the poet continues,
might be a negative way of describing the fact that women have

tremendous powers of intuitive identification and sympathy with
other people. And, yes, a woman could get totally lost in that?
she can lose all sense of her own but that is not
ego, necessary?it
be a source of power.
might
BCG: John Keats had weak ego boundaries.
AR: Negative capability. Exactly. Any artist has to have it to some
extent. . . . The male which is described as the
ego, strong ego,
could really be theweak ego, because it encapsulates itself.5
These two women, readers of Keats, make him an woman

honorary by
praising that in him which resembles what they have defined as feminine.
Indeed, this gesture would appear to accord with many of Keats's own
statements about his poetic stance. When Keats defines his own poetic
ideal against the bullying egotism of "Wordsworth &c," he defines what
is not his mode as clearly masculine: "We hate poetry that has a palpable
design upon us?and ifwe do not agree, seems to put its hands in its
breeches pocket."6 Yet while this passage suggests thatKeats defines his
poetry as a woman, he always makes it clear that it is not he himself
who is thewoman, but rather that he is themale suitor courting poetry
personified as a woman, as in his description of himself
"adoniz[ing]"
(n: 186)?that is, washing and dressing nicely?before sitting down to
write, or in his remark, "I know not why Poetry and I have been so
distant lately I must make some advances soon or she will cut me
entirely" (11:74).7 From the start, Keats defines his project by attaching
it to a masculine one: he writes, "The
preeminently Imagination may
be compared to Adam's dream?he awoke and found it truth" (1: 185).
Adam dreams of Eve while God shapes her out of Adam's rib; as
5- Adrienne Rich's Poetry, eds. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York:
Norton, 1975) 115.
6. The Letters of John Keats 1814-1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols.
(Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1: citations are in the text
1958) 224. Hereafter, given by volume and page
number.
7. On poetry as a woman, see Mario L. D'Avanzo, Keats's Metaphors the Poetic
for
Imagination (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1967) 25-31. See also Wolfson, "Feminizing
Keats."
344 MARGARET HOMANS
Christine Froula has pointed out, our original myth of creativity

amounts to the appropriation of female creation, represented as mater
nity, by two male figures.8 Keats equates his imaginative project, then,
not only with male sexual potency but also with themasculine appro
priation of the feminine.
That Keats asserts this equation so often suggests how defensively
unconfident he is of its truth in his case. Whenever he does describe
himself as a woman, his train of thought always counters the identifi
cation by juxtaposing to it an assertion of masculinity. For example,
when he describes his mood of what he calls "effeminacy" (11:78), the
mood eventually represented in the "Ode on Indolence," he also men
tions that his lassitude is due to a black eye, won, apparently, in a
fistfight with a butcher. (In this street-level version of the Bloomian
agon between poet and precursor, they were fighting over a kitten
instead of the muse.) In an earlier passage about poetic identity, an
apparent identification of his project with the woman's position turns
out to be an appropriation of it for themasculine:
It has been an old Comparison for our urging on?the Bee hive?
however it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than
the Bee?for it is a false notion thatmore is gained by receiving
than giving?no the receiver and the giver are equal in their bene
fits?The flower I doubt not receives a fair guerdon from the Bee?
its leaves blush deeper in the next spring?and who shall say be
tween Man and Woman which is the most delighted? Now it is
more noble to sit like Jove tha[n] to fly likeMercury?let us not
therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey-bee like, buzzing
here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be
arrived at: but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive
and receptive?(1: 232)
Keats here aligns the passivity of the flower with what he understands
to be women's sexual passivity, and if it's better to be like the flower,
as he claims, then by the logic of analogy it's better also to be like the
woman. This preference accords with Keats's dislike for the "irritable
reaching after fact & reason" that he opposes to "Negative Capability"
(1: 193), which Rich and Gelpi align with the egoless receptiveness they
see as feminine. But the same logic also aligns with flowers and women
the figure of Jove, who sits still in contrast to the bee-like, masculine
8. See Christine Froula, "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy,"
Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 321-47.
busyness of Mercury. No one could be less passive or flower-like than

Jove, but what the figure accomplishes is to define the passive female
position as one that's also powerfully masculine and therefore acceptable
to a poet who identifies his project with Adam's. By making Jove's
pleasure like a woman's, Keats also realigns Tiresias' claim that the
woman ismore "delighted" than theman. Here, Jove gets to have not
only power, but also an extra measure of pleasure, because his pleasure
is female; and so does Keats, writing as Jove-as-a-woman (even though,
at the end of the letter,modesty requires him to re-position himself as
or even a humble
"scullion-Mercury Bee").
That Keats habitually makes the apparent femininity of his negative
capability enhance masculine power and pleasure, inwriting as in love,
is confirmed in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law inwhich Keats
opposes his kind of poetry to the lived experience of sympathy with an
actual woman.
I hope I shall never marry. . . .The mighty abstract Idea I have of

Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic
happiness?an amiable wife and sweet Children I contemplate as a
part of that Beauty, but Imust have a thousand of those beautiful
particles to fill up my heart. I feelmore and more every day, as my
imagination strengthens, that I do not live in thisworld alone but
in a thousand worlds, (i: 403)
on to say that "the of women . . . to me as
(He goes generallity appear
children to whom I would rather give a Sugar Plum than my time.")
Paradoxically, it is just this ability to live in a thousand worlds, or his
negative capability, that feminizes him for and endears him to Adrienne
Rich; yet here he defines that capability in opposition to sympathy as a
practice, and the example he provides is telling. Though elsewhere
negative capability means "tak[ing] part in [the] existence a
[of sparrow]
and pick[ing] about in the Gravel" (1: 186), or identifying with Imogen
as much as lago (1: 387), here it is illustrated by his merging with
exclusively male "shapes of epic greatness": "I am with Achilles shouting
in the trenches or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my
whole being into Troilus" (1: 404). There is a contradiction here. That
living in a thousand worlds, or negative capability, depends upon "the
abstract Idea I have of Beauty" suggests that, despite his claim to be
continuously "in for?and filling some other Body" (1: 387), there is at
least one "body" that his identityless, negatively capable self prefers not
to enter into or to be entered by: it prefers to keep women distinct as
objects of vision. If his creative project is defined as courtship, the
woman must remain resistant to him and intact or "abstract"; her com
346 MARGARET HOMANS
pliance would spoil everything. Although he declares that it is his idea

of Beauty that would stifle "domestic happiness," not the other way
around, his hyperbole suggests his fear that it is rather the idea of real
sympathy in domestic lifewith a woman that threatens his power as a
poet. This implication ismade explicit by a "true Story" Keats recounts
in a much later letter, in which a woman pregnant with triplets canni
balizes her husband, who kills her in self defense (n: 236). By insisting
that women remain what he calls "abstract Beauty," he objectifies
women and subordinates them to his own poetic projects.
Keats's reflections on women readers follow a similar Keats
pattern'.
suffered, both emotionally and financially, from the failure of his three
books of poetry to attract a wide audience during his lifetime.While he
and his friends blamed this situation on the poor or nonexistent reviews
of his Poems of 1817 and of Endymion?he speaks of publishing poems
as "hanging them up to be flyblown on the Reviewshambles" (11:70)?
his third volume was well reviewed (that is, liked by an elite of educated
male readers) but still did not sell. Keats explains the situation in the
following way:
One of the causes, I understand from different quarters, of the
unpopularity of this new book, and the others also, is the offence
the ladies take at me. On thinking thatmatter over, I am certain
that I have said nothing in a spirit to displease any woman Iwould
care to please: but still there is a tendency to class women in my
books with roses and never see themselves dom
sweetmeats,?they
inant. (11: 327)
Although he viewed the public in general as an "Enemy" (see 1: 266-67

and 1: 415), Keats understood a major part of his problem with the
public as a failure to attract a female audience.9 He also understands that
power can be given and withheld through figuration, and that a woman
who has been made a sweetmeat cannot also be dominant. Although in
thisway he reminds himself of his imaginative authority, implicitly the
passage is about his fear of women's real dominance, for he attributes
to women readers, rightly or wrongly, the power tomake him succeed
or fail in the marketplace. Because of changing patterns of work and
leisure, women (whose schooling led them to prefer novels or narrative
verse) had been replacing the elite group of classically educated men as
9- John Barnard, citing Tim Chilcott (A Publisher and his Circle: The Life and Works of
John Taylor, Keats's Publisher [Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972]),
discusses the documented importance of women readers for "the success of literature" and
the risk that Keats was taking in disdaining a female audience; John Keats (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge UP, 1987) 13-14.
the chief consumers of literature. Moreover, class difference often mag

nifies Keats's sense of the power of women readers: it is chiefly (though
not always) "ladies," women from the classes above the one into which
he was born, to whom a book must appeal in order to succeed. Far
from doing anything to attract a female audience, however, Keats reveals
an active disdain for women readers and for the steps he views as
necessary to attract them. He identifies "wom[e]n Iwould care to please"
as those who do not mind being turned into sweetmeats and do not
seek to dominate. By objectifying and subordinating figures of women
in his poems, he strikes back at what he perceives to be real women's
dominance.
Quite possibly, the state of affairs depicted in this passage is not so

much an after-the-fact as the result of Keats's intentions. For in
analysis
a recorded conversation to whose full context we will want to return,
"[Keats] said he does not want ladies to read his poetry: that he writes
for men" (n: 163). His remarks about literary ladies and women bear
out this hostility to the prospect of a female readership. In one letter he
half-jokingly remarks that one of his "Ambitions" is to "upset the
drawling of the blue stocking literaryworld" (11: 139). Bluestockings he
defines elsewhere as "Devils," as "a set ofWomen, who having taken a
snack or Luncheon of Literary scraps, set themselves up for towers of
Babel in Languages Sapphos in Poetry" (1: 163), and again he describes
as "sublime Petticoats" two literary ladies who published their corre
spondence with Rousseau (11: 266). In another letter, discussing the
shallowness of themany readers who delight in the popular poets Mary
Tighe and James Beattie, he remarks (now condemning equally women
of all classes) that "This same inadequacy is discovered ... inWomen
with few exceptions?the Dress Maker, the blue Stocking and themost
charming sentimentalist differ but in a Slight degree, and are equally
smokeable?" (11: 18-19).
One episode recounted in the same letter suggests particularly well
not only how a readership was established inKeats's day, but also Keats's
resentment of the power of women readers (especially elite ones) and
his tendency to defuse that power with reductive objectifications. Keats
recounts the story of the circulation of a copy of Endymion that ended
with one of the two Porter sisters, authors of successful historical ro
mances, seeking an introduction to him. His friend and patron Richard
Woodhouse had loaned his copy to his cousin Mary Frogley, who loaned
it in turn to her friend, Henry Neville, who loaned it to Jane Porter,
who shared itwith her sisterMaria and loaned it to a Miss Fitzgerald.
(Note thatwhile the original owner of the book was a man, four of the
five people who read it on this particular extended loan are women.)
Returning the book toHenry Neville, Jane Porter regrets that he cannot
348 MARGARET HOMANS
introduce her to the poet, "for," she writes, "I should have been happy
to have acknowledged to him . . . the very rare delight my Sister and
myself have enjoyed from this first fruits of Genius" (n: 10).Woodhouse
offers tomake the introduction himself and urges Keats to take advan
. . . for an introduction to a class of
tage of what he calls this "opening
society, from which you may possibly derive advantage as well as
gratification." Keats however feels "more obliged than flattered by this."
As figures for the world of popular literature, both as successful pro
ducers of it and as readers who could be trendsetters, theMisses Porter
appear to Keats as all that he disdains to court. He writes that he would
go through with the meeting only "for the pleasure of writing to you
about it" (that is, to George and Georgiana), so as to "give you an
extravaganza of a Lady Romancer," as he puts it. "I shall certainly see
"
a new race of People, he writes, considering briefly a possible meeting;
but, he goes on, "?I shallmore certainly have no time for them" (n: 11).
Ifwe recall Lockhart's association of Keats with footmen and govern
esses, surely part of what bothers Keats about the Porter sisters is that
they represent what Woodhouse calls a "class of society" above Keats's
own. To lifthimself out of his own class by writing as he does highbrow
poetry?poetry that required a Latin education, poetry in the line of
Homer and Milton?is also for Keats to rise above all women considered
as a class, and he resents being "obliged" to look up to women who
write mere romances, because are and
just they wealthy upperclass.
Here and elsewhere, one of Keats's habitual defenses against the power
of women readers of whatever class is to transform them from reading
subjects into objects of (visual) description. He deflates the considerable
literary authority of Jane Porter by writing that he would meet her only
so as to write about her. Keats makes a similar gesture following his
cross-class indictment of the shallow women readers ofMary Tighe and
James Beattie. As that letter continues, he half-apologizes for what he
has said but offers the disclaimer that "I have not one opinion upon any
thing except in matters of taste?I never can feel certain of any truth
but from a clear perception of itsBeauty" (n: 19) and goes on to discuss
the development of his taste in painting. The next day's entry begins
with a dinner party about which he comments, "I never intend here
after to spend any time with Ladies unless they are handsome?you lose
time to no purpose" (11: 20). Over the course of this letter Keats has
neutralized the nagging topic of women as opinionated subjects, by
assuring himself thatwomen need only be looked at.
As this sequence suggests, much as he equates poetic ability with
sexual Keats the need to attract a female
potency, equates readership
with the need to attractwomen sexually, and he scorns that compulsion
as much as he disdains to seek women readers. These attitudes appear
to be the compensatory, defensive forms taken by Keats's feeling of

both literary and sexual inadequacy. After a long meditation on how his
early idealization of women gave way to his present perplexing distaste
for women's company, he writes, "I do think better of Womankind
than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet hight likes
them or not" (i: 342). Shortly before this account of the Jane Porter
own expense about a dance he will attend:
episode he makes jokes at his
"I shall be obliged to shirk a good many there?I shall be the only
Dandy there?and indeed merely comply with the invitation that the
I
party may not be entirely destitute of a specimen of that Race. I shall
a a list of the
appear in complete dress of purple Hat and all?with
beauties I have conquered embroidered round my Calves" (11: 8). This
passage concludes a paragraph that begins with his very first description
of Fanny Brawne, whom he is already hoping to attract. That his
thoughts thereafter flow to theDandy who "shirks" suggests that being
under the obligation to attract makes Keats want to The sequence
repel.
a Dandy, to refusing to seek
leading from thinking of Fanny, to being
Porter's favor eroticizes his refusal of an important woman reader
Jane
as a Dandy's "shirking" and maps his anxiety about women readers
onto his anxiety about love. This connection finds compressed form in
a later statement about audience: "I feel every confidence that if I choose
Imay be a popular writer; that Iwill never be; but for all that Iwill get
a livelihood?I equally dislike the favour of the public with the love of
a woman?they are both a cloying treacle to thewings of independence"
Porter's as a reader comes from her
(11: 144). Whereas Jane power partly
class status, the power in Keats's mind of Fanny Brawne, whose class
position was not significantly higher than his own, comes chiefly from
her attractions.
personal
Mingling
" thoughts of female readers with thoughts of "the love of a
woman, Keats makes Fanny Brawne into the prototype of the woman
reader, and he acts out in his relation to her much of his anxiety about
women readers at large. Keats directed Fanny Brawne's reading: he
taught her to dislike Byron, and his letters to her mention the loan of
various books including a Spenser with the most beautiful passages
marked (11: 302). He also took great pleasure in educating the literary
taste of his young sister Fanny. As Fanny Brawne's letters to Fanny
Keats after Keats's death make clear, she enjoyed reading and talking
about books, "unless it is to such a very great judge that I am affraid
theywill think all my delightful criticism nonsense."10 Such a judge she
io. Fanny Brawne, Letters of Fanny Brawne to Fanny Keats, 1820-1824, ed. Fred
Edgcumbe (New York: Oxford UP, 1937) 49; cited hereafter in the text as "Brawne"
350 MARGARET HOMANS
almost certainly felt Keats himself was?later, sending the Spenser to

Fanny Keats, she refers to him as "one who I have heard called the best
judge of poetry living" (Brawne 84)?and he also quite ferociously
directs Fanny Brawne as a reader of himself. From the Isle of Wight in
the summer of 1819 he writes to her, "Why may I not speak of your
Beauty, since without that I could never have lov'd you?I cannot
conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. . . .
So letme speak of you [for your] Beauty, though to my own endan
gering; if you could be so cruel to me as to try elsewhere its Power"
(n: 127). Though Keats often omits the final "r" from "your," his slip
here reinforces the conflation he makes here and elsewhere between
a
Fanny and Beauty. Earlier in the same letter, in remark typical of what
had provoked Fanny's objection in the first place, he writes: "All my
at all cured me
thoughts, my unhappiest days and nights have I find not
of my love of Beauty, but made it so intense that I am miserable that
you are not with me" (11: 126). Keats, by continuing to speak of her
Beauty, shows that she is not to prevail as a reader of him, and invoking
the chimera of her supposed erotic power justifies his further disempow
ering her. She has attempted a critique of his writing?indeed of the
central tenet of his creed in his worship of Beauty?and he responds by
declaring her reading invalid. And then he effaces her critique further
by burning it.11
In addition to directing Fanny's reading and her reading of him, he
also directs her writing, appropriating her voice in his strongest defense
followed by pages. These letters put it beyond question that she loved and mourned Keats
most sincerely, if in a less extravagant and literary way than his own: "I can tell you who
next to me (I must say next to me) loved him best, that I have not got over it and never
shall" 32).
11. In a dissertation came to my attention after I read this paper at the
chapter that
Institute, Sonia Hofkosh makes a point that is quite close to my own, about
English
Keats's attempts to control Fanny's writing and its implications for Keats's sense of women
readers. In the context of a discussion of the roles of female figures in the male imagining
of authorship, she argues that for Keats (as for Byron) getting an audience is like seduction.
a
She cites the passage I quote above, linking the favor of the public with the love of
woman, and she writes, "'the love of a woman' involves competition over who writes
the story of the poet's desire. ... As the reader of his love letters and a writer of her
own, [Fanny Brawne's] power for and over Keats derives from her capacity to imagine
and inscribe the story of passion in other words. . . . Keats, unable to supervise her
can govern his own creative power. . . . The erotic
creativity, remains in doubt that he
'Power' Fanny Brawne wields is also the power of others to declare Keats either a poet
or a 'weaver boy.'" She also discusses one of his attempts to edit Fanny's letters (I will
discuss others below). This chapter appeared as "The Writer's Ravishment: Women and
the Romantic Author?The Example of Byron" in Anne K. Mellor, ed., Romanticism and
Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988) 93-114, quotations 106-8.
as object of desire who is

against what he feels is her power over him
also a woman reader. In his first extant letter to her he asks her a
a reader by supplying her answer:
question, then denies her freedom as
"Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so
entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in
the Letter you must write immediately and do all you can to console
me in it?make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me ..."
(n: 123). While it is easy to imagine Fanny wanting to answer "no," the
rhetoricization of his question leaves her no room. Many times in their
later correspondence he expresses his love through telling her what
to say: "Write me ever so few lines and tell you [for me] you will
never for ever be less kind to me than yesterday" (11: 222); "Send me
every evening a written Good night" (11: 262), which it appears she
did. In a letter inwhich he reiterates the exclamations about her beauty
that she had attempted to critique, he corrects her writing in another
too: "For some reason or other last night's note was not so
way your
treasureable as former ones. I would fain that you call me Love still"
(11:263).
Another time, she has apparently written to him to calm his jealousy;
his correction starts with a quotation from her letter, "'you must be
satisfied in knowing that I admired you much more than your friend.'"
He "I cannot believe there ever was or ever could be any
responds,
thing to admire in me especially as far as sight goes?I cannot be

admired, I am not a thing to be admired. You are, I love you; all I can
bring you is a swooning admiration of your Beauty" (11: 133). And at
the end of this letter he writes, "I will imagine you Venus tonight and
pray, pray, pray to your star like a Hethen. / Your's ever, fair Star. ..."
Keats cannot bear the thought of her admiring him, because in his view
admiration transforms its object into a "thing." But to turn her into an
beautiful a star or enhances his sense that he
eternally thing, planet,
himself could never be reified in thisway. Or, to put it the other way
around, Keats constitutes himself as a male the I who ad
subject?as
mires?by limiting Fanny to being the object of his vision, by appro

priating all the speaking parts, even hers, and leaving her nothing to
say.
Just as Keats's appropriation of Fanny's voice has its forgivable pathos,

he elsewhere makes ventriloquizing a woman reader (Georgiana) ap
pealing by making it funny. Keats writes "to you" (that is, to George)
but "at your Wife" (11:204). By comically preempting her responses, he
projects his resistance to her as her resistance to him, picturing her as a
bad reader, inattentive because she subordinates to other and
reading
specifically female activities.
352 MARGARET HOMANS
Haydon?yes your wife will say, 'here is a sum total account of

Haydon again Iwonder your Brother don't put amonthly bulleteen
in the Philadelphia Papers about him?I wont hear?no?skip down
to the bottom?aye and there are some more of his verses, skip
(lullaby-by) them too" "No, lets go regularly through" "I wont
hear a word about Haydon?bless the child, how rioty she is!?
there go on there" Now pray go on here for I have a few words to
about . . .
say Haydon. (n: 205-6)
He defeats her supposed will to intervene by occupying the space she

would skip with writing about skipping, and then he picks up where
he left off. Though the comic effect depends on Keats's knowledge that
she would indeed care to read every word, the passage seems to have
been prompted by her having once remarked that there was "nothing
but Haydon" (11: 241) in his letters; taking up her voice is his way of
insuring against any future independence as a reader.
Keats's assumptions of the voices of Georgiana and Fanny could be
described as gestures of empathetic identification with an other of the
kind he names negative capability, through which he also identifieswith
the sparrow and with Achilles. But they could better be described as
acts of self-aggrandizing appropriation. Keats opposes living "in a thou
sand worlds" to lifewith any particular woman, and although Georgiana
does not threaten Keats sexually in the way Fanny does, the picture of
her distracted by her "rioty" child echoes and confirms Keats's skeptical
view of "the more divided and minute domestic happiness?an amiable
wife and sweet Children" that he earlier says is "stifled" by his idea of
Beauty " and who threaten literally to consume the man in his "true
Story. To Fanny, in the same letter inwhich he silences her as Venus,
he also writes "I tremble at domestic cares?yet for you Iwould meet
them, though if itwould leave you the happier Iwould rather die than
do so" (11: 133). Despite the fact that, ordinarily, the "domestic care" of
children served the interests of fathers at least as much as of mothers,
when Keats speaks with a woman's voice, he is defending against any
deviation she might make from silence, deferential reading, and the
embodiment of his own thoughts (such as his "mighty abstract Idea . . .
of Beauty"). And when he defends against women as independent speak
ers and readers, he appropriates their power for his own masculinity, as
when at once his own power and women's
Jove enjoys pleasure.
Keats's letters favoring what is usually summarized as negative ca
pability date before the end of 1818. InNovember 1817 he writes, "Men
of Genius . . . have not any determined Character"
individuality, any
(1: 184). The letter defining negative capability is dated December 1817
(i: 193). In February 1818 Keats writes both the letter critiquing poetry
written to promulgate "the whims of an Egotist" (1: 223) and the letter
inwhich he honors the ideal passivity of the flower by comparing it to
Jove. The well-known passage about the "Mansion of Many Apart
ments" appears inMay 1818, with its "Mist," "Mystery," and "dark
Passages" (1: 280-281) reminiscent of the "uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts" thatmake up negative capability. In October 1818 he describes
toGeorge and Georgiana his feeling of living in a thousand worlds, and,
writing toWoodhouse, he distinguishes "the Wordsworthian or ego
tistical sublime" from his own "poetical Character": "it is not itself?it
has no self?it is every thing and nothing?It has no character"; and
twice he repeats that the poet is "unpoetical" and has "no identity"
(1: 386-87). By abrupt contrast, in April 1819 the term "identity" has
become a wholly favorable one, in his account of "the world" as "the
vale of Soul-making": "There may be intelligences or sparks of the
divinity inmillions?but they are not Souls till they acquire identities,
till each one is personally itself" (11: 102); and he details the process by
which "the sense of Identity" is formed. As time passes, the letters reveal
an increasing tendency to seek solitude in life and self-sufficiency in
poetry. Living alone inWinchester in August 1819, Keats writes to
Reynolds, "My own being which I know to be becomes of more con
sequence to me than the crowds of Shadows in the Shape of Man and
women that inhabit a kingdom. The Soul is a world of itself and has
enough to do in its own home" (11: 146). Or * again the next summer he
writes to Shelley that an artist "must have self-concentration,' selfish
ness perhaps. . . .My imagination is a Monastry and I am itsMonk"
(11: 322-23).
One way to explain this change is to note that all along his language
for defining negative capability is predominantly negative, so that cel
ebrating a positive sense of identity may be the logical outcome of the
ambivalence these negations have expressed all along.12 Keats's with
drawal into himself has been attributed to depression over his growing
12. I am indebted here to Paul de Man,

who argues that "Keats's gift for sympathy has
a negative aspect" and discusses
the ambiguity of Keats's ostensibly positive use of the
"
nonetheless negatively charged word "self-destroying. See his "Introduction" to John
Keats, Selected Poetry (New York: New American Library, 1966) xxii-xxiii. Aileen Ward
"
reads "the Soul is a world of itself as synonymous with Keats's wish to live in a thousand
worlds, on the grounds that both testify to the strengthening of his imagination in relation
to a shrinking audience, not, as I see it, as a contrast to thatwish. See '"That Last Infirmity
of Noble Mind': Keats and the Idea of Fame," in The Evidence of the Imagination, eds.
Donald Reiman, Michael C. Jaye, and Betty T. Bennett (New York: New York UP,
1978) 323.
354 MARGARET HOMANS
illness, although this is not likely the case when he writes the letter
about soul-making. In the late fall of 1818, between that letter and the
last of the letters celebrating "no identity," Tom died and Keats met and
fell in love with Fanny Brawne, and itmay be that falling in love?
perhaps made possible, for a man who said "the thought of [my Broth
ers] has always stifled the impression that any woman might otherwise
have made upon me" (1: 293), by the death of one brother after the
emigration of the other?contributes materially to the radical change in
his view of identity and self.13The letter of October 1818, about love
and marriage, is the first to sound openly self-contradictory about the
unboundedness of negative capability. If living in a thousand worlds
erects a "barrier" between himself and any women he might love, then
his devotion to negative capability has undone itself, by requiring a limit
to the outgoing of the self. Because he sometimes formulates negative
capability as a defense against and appropriation of women and femi
ninity, the turn toward a self-contained identitymay extend or fulfill?
not diverge from? that ongoing defensiveness, with the difference that,
early on, one woman would seem to limit his entering into others, while
later, one woman threatens to carry his too far. For
negative capability
as several critics have pointed out, in Keats's letters to Fanny from the
summer of 1819 and later, he writes of feeling that the "thought of you
would uncrystallize and dissolve me" (11: 142); "you absorb me in spite
of myself" (11: 133).14 This sense of dissolution Keats explicitly links to
the thought of death: "I have two luxuries to brood over inmy walks,
Loveliness and the hour of my death. . . . would I could take a
your
sweet poison from your lips to send me out of [theworld]" (11: 133). It
is thus as a defense against Fanny's supposed power of life and death
that he appropriates her voice as a reader and turns her into a silent
Venus. The constitution of his specifically masculine authority and sub
jectivity is in his view a necessary (if scarcely adequate) antidote to her
13. De Man charts what he sees as Keats's not wholly voluntary turn, in the latest
poems, to a more rigid sense of selfhood and attributes this turn in part to the influence
of Fanny Brawne, "a highly distinct and specific person whose presence awakens in him
an acute sense of threatened selfhood" (xxix). Susan Wolfson, likewise, building on de
Man, argues that Keats "realized that his love for Fanny had made him exceptionally
conscious of himself, or 'selfish'"; "Keats is now aware that this easy self-annihilation [of
negative capability], a creative asset, is an existential liability": "Composition and
though
'Unrest': The Dynamics of Form in Keats's Last Lyrics," Keats-Shelley Journal 34 (1985):
57 and 66. Together with Hofkosh, Wolfson argues that Keats's late poems are attempts
at "resistance" to "the power he feels Fanny exerts over him" (59).
14. Wolfson, "Composition and 'Unrest'" 59 and 65, and Hofkosh 107, both discuss
the passage about dissolving in the context of Keats's resistance to it.
threat to his identity?a sense of identity he scarcely thought he wanted,

until he felt she would take it from him. His final defense against his
thought of her power comes when he has her last letters to him buried
with him, unopened and unread.
A female figure promises a dissolution of the poet's identity that is at
once pleasurable and profoundly threatening, so that he defends himself
by substituting his words for hers and by objectifying her. This sum
mary of what I have said about the letters to Fanny Brawne is also a
crude summary of the plot of "Ode to a Nightingale," which is not to
say that theOde is in some determinate way "about" Fanny (it predates
the first of those letters by two months), but rather that in those letters
Keats employs a strategy already familiar to him. The poem begins with
empathy with a female figure (the nightingale is a "dryad" and inevitably
embodies an allusion to Philomela) and the pleasurable loss of identity,
in a scene of gorgeous darkness that recalls the "dark Passages" of the
letters favoring negative capability (and of other poems such as "The
Eve of St. Agnes" and "Hyperion" that are also "explorative of those
dark Passages"). Just as Keats claims to lose himself in Fanny's Beauty,
the poem loses itself in beautiful natural images. But when the poet
becomes aware that his escape from the pain of self-conscious mortality
is only another form of death (when the "embalmed darkness" of the
forest becomes his own love of easeful death), the poet recovers his
sense of identity by projecting meanings on, or reading, the bird's
historical and mythical significances. Making her a generic nightingale,
"
as Keats makes Fanny generic "Beauty, and substituting for her present
song the historical memory of absent songs, the speaker is returned (if
painfully) to his "sole self," while she continues down the dark passages
he has resisted. To read the female is to be confined in identity, and yet
not to read her is to risk becoming a phantom of dispersed identity.15
15-My sense of the consequences of "reading" for "identity" comes here not from
Fetterley's political notion of "resistant reading" but from the psychological account of a
to reading"
"resistance in Thomas Weiskel's chapter on Wordsworth in The Romantic
Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 167-204. See also my own elaboration of the notion that
Weiskel's opposition between seeing images and reading symbolically is founded on gender
difference (Weiskel's sense of "reading" amounts to themale poet's killing the
primordial,
female object?the mother). Dorothy Wordsworth's resistance to reading, her choice
instead to see and preserve images as images (more wholehearted than her brother's) stems
from her wish to protect the mother and the female; Keats's choice to read the female
(equivocal as it is )would stem from his sense that, for himself as male poet, "life to
" [her]
would be death tome. See Bearing theWord: Language and Female Experience inNineteenth
Century Women's Writing (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 40-67. Fetterley's political sense
356 MARGARET HOMANS
The Fall ofHyperion involves a more complex instance of a poet

reading a female figure, and this poem Keats explicitly links to his love
for Fanny: "Forgive me if Iwander a little this evening, for I have been
all day employ'd in a very abstract Poem and I am deep in love with
you?two things which must excuse me" (11: 132). Compared to the
first version ofHyperion (written when "no identity" was amore simply
favorable state), The Fall ofHyperion shifts its attention from the events
narrated to the poet's identity and experience and especially his con
frontation with the muse-like Moneta. As the poet's most severe reader
critic, Moneta is the form Keats gives to his view that Fanny (and
perhaps to a lesser degree other women readers) holds over him the
power of life and death.16 Just as Fanny has said she "admires" Keats,
which he construes as transforming him into a "thing," and has also
...
critiqued his tendency to identify her with his "abstract idea of
Beauty" (for a reason analogous to his own dislike of being made into
a "thing"), Moneta critiques the speaker's idealism as a poet, and she
threatens him with death by freezing (rendering him a thing). Moreover,
Moneta's divinity may link her to the class status of thewomen readers
who, apart from Fanny Brawne, made Keats themost anxious. And yet
Keats makes Moneta a victim like the other Titans, and the poet's
framing double dream makes it doubly clear that she is the figment of
his imagination. As a powerful victim, she embodies not so much sheer
female power as equivocality about that power: he "had a terror" of
her robes and her words "soften" "near ... to a mother's"
veils, yet
(1: 249-51).17 When she unveils, the terrifying sight of her "bright
blanched" face ismitigated by the "benignant light" of her eyes, which,
it turns out, look benign because they are "visionless entire," "But, in
blank splendour, beam'd like themild moon, /Who comforts those she
sees not" (1: 257, 265-70). Her blindness may recall the visionary blind
ness of Milton or Homer, yet simultaneously and as if to cancel those
allusions, Moneta as blind moon also recalls as Venus. The trans
Fanny
formation of a powerful woman into a "fair star" helps consolidate the
masculine power and identity of the star- (or moon-) gazer.
Unable to see him, transformed instead into an object of the poet's
gaze, Moneta is changed from seer to seen and from threatening reader
of women's need to resist the dangerous misrepresentations of them in androcentric writing

could be seen, in this context, as a call for women to resist reading men's failures to resist
women.
reading
16. De Man remarks, "Fanny Brawne may well have looked to him more like Moneta
than like La Belle Dame sans Merci" xxxiii.
17. Quotations from the poems follow The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978); citations are given in the text by line (and canto) number.
to the read. And better than Fanny (or Jane Porter), Moneta generously
authorizes thismove. She herself offers him the sight of "the scenes /
Still swooning vivid through my globed brain" (i: 244-45), which he
paraphrases as "what things the hollow brain / Behind enwombed"
(1: 276-77). The male poet penetrating the womb-brain of the seen
unseeing woman effectually neutralizes the initial impression of her
power and transforms her primarily from reader-critic into a thing to
be read and interpreted. To be fair to Keats's careful equivocality, the
poet's vision?what he sees inside her brain?includes both her and
himself as both subjects and objects of vision. He neither claims for
himself the position of unseen seer, nor positions her solely as object of
vision. She is present not only as part of the frozen trio of fallen gods
who comprise the vision (1: 385) but also as guide and commentator
whose "voice / Came brief upon my ear" (1: 300).18 For himself as a
seer, the poet chooses the dispersal of his identity (like negative capa
bility, or like being in love) that comes with sharing the pains and
"burthens" of what he sees; the poem's language identifies the poet's
experience not only with that of the new poet Apollo in the earlier
version ("I shriek'd . . . life seem'd / To pour in" [1: 126, 133-134;
compare Hyperion m: 135 and 117]) but also with that of the characters
Saturn and Hyperion ("a palsied chill / Struck from the paved level up
my limbs" [1: 122-23; compare Hyperion 1: 259-60 and Fall 1: 386 and
426]).
At the same time, conversely, his identification with what he sees
may show how very inclusive and powerful his identity is, if all these
figures emerge from his experience. In the same way, we might ask of
his relation toMoneta the question we asked of Keats's speaking for
women in his letters. To see into Moneta's brain may be an extreme
and literal instance of negative capability (he is almost telepathically

"being in for?and filling some other body"), but itmay rather be an
act of the of her memory and
extraordinary egotism, appropriation
or even a onto her, since the vision is so close to
thoughts, projection
what the poet invented for the first Hyperion. The more heavy and
18. Geoffrey Hartman, in a discussion of the way the poet comes to be part of his own
vision (to which my account of the poem is indebted), remarks of the long moment when
the poet sustains the vision himself, "Moneta, at this crucial point, remains silent, and so
adds herself to what must be borne." I would place the emphasis differently: not on
Moneta's letting the burden drop, but on Keats's arranging things so as to be required,
and able, to pick it up. See "Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion"
in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1975) 57
73, quotation 64.
358 MARGARET HOMANS
immortal the weight his "own weak mortality" bears, the more we
admire his heroism as a poet; yet because Moneta is initially a mother

figure, her inclusion in what the poet comes to "bear" ("I bore /The
load of this eternal quietude" [i: 389-90]) allows him to appropriate
mothers' powers for his own: the poet who eats the remains of Eve's
meal at the beginning of the poem comes to mother his own muse by
the end.19 Reading into or onto Moneta, the poet grants incomparable
dignity and grandeur to the appropriative gestures he makes toward
other female figures who threaten to read him.
When Keats appropriates Fanny Brawne's voice so as to affirm his
vision of her as "abstract and so as in turn to confirm the
Beauty"
stability of his masculine identity, he simultaneously seeks her sexual
loyalty and her loyalty as a reader, especially as the prototype of a more
general female readership. His jealousy of the other men Fanny meets
and, he imagines, flirtswith parallels his jealousy of her possible literary
seduction by other authors, as Walter Jackson Bate suggests when he
remarks that in The Cap and Bells Keats mocks "Byron himself, whom
Fanny Brawne had admired in the past, and perhaps still did."20 When
Keats vies with Byron for Fanny's attention, it is not only for her, but
also for the female readers that Fanny represents. Of Keats's comment
that the unpopularity of his last book was owing to "the offence the
ladies take at me" (11: 327) his friend Charles Brown wrote, "Lord
Byron, really popular among women, " reduced them, to the offence of
some men, to 'roses and sweetmeats' (11: 328). What Keats is obliged
to want?but does not want to have to court?is a share of
specifically
female audience, an audience that at least in Keats's view iden
Byron's
tifies sexual with literary attraction.
A close reading of the first part of a letter to George and Georgiana
(the long letterwritten between February and May 1819) helps reveal
the logic of Keats's thoughts connecting Byron's literary and sexual
success, female and and his own as a He
sexuality power, identity poet.
begins with news of writing "The Eve of St. Agnes"?then of women

one: "Miss Brawne and I have now and
acquaintances, especially every
then a chat and a tiff"?then of the literary world: "another satire is
expected from Byron call'd Don Giovanni" (11: 59). He continues with
19- On Moneta as mother, see Hartman 72-73, and Barbara A. Schapiro, The Romantic
Mother: Narcissistic Patterns inRomantic Poetry (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP,
1983) 54-59
20. WalterJackson Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford UP, 1966) 624. Fanny contin
ued to like parts of Byron, to read "trumpery" novels, and to attend dances with other
men when Keats was out of town.
social and literary news about London and about their circle of friends,
a train of thought that leads to a story touching painfully on his sense
of combined sexual and literary inadequacy. Someone referred to him
as "quite the little Poet," on which he comments, with an implicit
comparison to Lord Byron: "You see what it is to be under six foot and
not a lord." This story is followed directly by mention of "a young
Man who delighted a young woman with a Valentine" (n: 61), a story
thatmight recall the day when Keats ghost-wrote a valentine for George
to give Georgiana. Next, Keats turns to his own writing together with
Brown's: "We i e Brown and I sit opposite one another all day author
izing (N.B. an s instead of a z would give a different meaning) He is
at present writing a Story of an old Woman ..." (n: 61). The play on
the spelling of "authorizing" suggests Keats's uneasiness about the au
thority of his own authorship. In Brown's story, the devil gives an old
woman "three pips of eve's apple," which both inspire and grant her
wish to be "beautiful enough to make all theworld and even the other
world fall in love with her." The woman achieves sexual dominance
over all men; "all but the blind are smitten." Finally the devil falls in
love with her too, and as a consequence she gives birth to John Knox,
William Gifford (the hated editor of the Quarterly Review), and others
Brown and Keats disliked. Following this story is a brief account of
some business failures and of a freethinking publisher imprisoned for
his pamphlets, and then, by contrast, a report of financial success: Keats
notes thatMurray has "sold 4000 coppies of Lord Byron" (11:62)?
apparently of the last canto of Childe Harolde?and mentions the sum of
?25,000. The thought of Byron is followed by a return to Keats's own
literary projects: "the Pot of Basil, St Agnes Eve, and . . . the 'eve of
"
St Mark,' on which he comments, see what fine mother Radcliff
"you
names I have."
The emotional oscillations of this series of passages appear to me

roughly as follows: The thoughts of his own writing ("The Eve of St.
Agnes") and of his interest in Fanny Brawne collide with the thought
of Byron's success. The sexual as well as class dimension of this contrast
he makes explicit when he juxtaposes the remark about "quite the little
Poet" with his second allusion to Byron, which calls attention to Byron's
sexy class position. These thoughts of his social, sexual, and literary
inadequacy compared to Byron lead to the compensatory thought of a
successful seduction through poetry (the valentine) that might be his.
This tentative optimism, however, leads in turn to its own negation in
a story of too-powerful female sexuality. That the old woman's seduc
tiveness is set inmotion by themale agency of the devil is a monstrous
inversion of the valentine, where sexual arousal ismodest and controlled.
360 MARGARET HOMANS
In context, the story of the woman and the devil suggests Keats's
ambivalence about a male
poet arousing the interest of a female audience.
He needs women t? want him and his books, yet he resents women's
power in the literary marketplace as much as he resents their sexual
power over him. Byron comes back into Keats's thoughts as the author
who, like the devil in the story, both with tarnished yet still potent
nobility, activates female desire and not only gets away with it but
profits by it. The thought of Byron returns him to his own need for an
audience, and his efforts to court one appear in his mention of his new
poems' popular "mother Radcliff names." These names Keats sounds
oddly guilty about: "it is not my fault?I did not search for them," he
adds, as ifhe is embarrassed to be caught imitating so voguish and low
brow an author.
In the letter, Keats transforms sexual and literary inadequacy into
potency and imaginatively fulfills his hope of matching the success of
Byron, who turns the passion he arouses into profit. Three features of
the sequence especially point to strategies for success both with and over
women readers, and over First, the old woman's erotic power
Byron.
and what could be called the elevation of her class position depend
entirely on male desire, and thus, like Keats's other objectified women,
she is less powerful than she seems. Second, if, like the devil, the poet
is the one responsible for releasing women's sexuality and power, then
no matter how great those powers, he establishes his potential for con
trolling them. Third, he will write like a woman: by writing poems
with "mother Radcliff names," he revises the aggressive "old Dame" in
Brown's into a voice he can to further his own inter
story appropriate
ests. In the scene Keats has inmind when he compares imagination to
Adam's dream, God and Adam originate a myth of creation as paternity
thatKeats inherits through, and that endorses, the line of literary fathers
reaching from the Bible and Homer toMilton and Wordsworth and to
himself. Keats opposes to this favorable picture of literary fathers the
line of his literarymothers. The old woman who spawns monsters with
the aid of "three pips from eve's apple" becomes "mother Radcliff," a
owes an important lit
literary progenetrix to whom Keats reluctantly
erary debt. This debt Keats is as eager to devalue and efface, by trans
Radcliffe into a comic monster and an implicitly crone-like
forming
"[grand-]mother," as he is eager to claim the line of literary fathers. He
at once appropriates the gothic for his own uses and mocks Radcliffe as
its source. (He had in another letter also parodied Radcliffe: "I intend to
tip you the Damosel Radcliffe?I'll cavern you, and grotto you, and
waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you,
and tremendous sound you, and solitude you" [i: 245].) This scenario
resonates (though without the comedy) with his later invention ofMo
neta, whose maternal power he appropriates after first eating Eve's meal.
Appropriating a woman's voice while denying its integrity, here with
Radcliffe as in relation to Fanny Brawne, is Keats's way of harnessing
women's erotic and to serve his own, so that, in his
literary power
mind, he can outdo successes.
Byron's
Keats rehearses in this letter his insistence upon his own masculine
with an s, as he it?as a lover and as a
authority?authorising puts
writer. It is an authority defined through the control of women's sex
uality and of their voices, and through the appropriation of these to his
interests (figured as the interests of male authority more generally), as
we see in his subordination of literary mothers to literary fathers. In
"The Eve of St. Agnes," a poem that borrows more of its language
"
from "mother Radcliff than just its title,21Porphyro seduces Madeleine
with the aid of the "ancient ditty ... La belle dame sans mercy." In
some further remarks about "The Eve of St. Agnes," recorded in Sep
tember 1819 by Richard Woodhouse, Keats shows himself to be carrying
this insistence on male even further than we have so far seen.
authority
Just prior to the remark Iwant to discuss, Keats insists that an alteration
he made to the poem was not an imitation of Byron, thus bringing
competition with Byron into the subtext of what follows. Next, Keats's
desired revision would make the poem more sexually explicit (a revision
Keats was ultimately persuaded to discard). Originally, "innocent" read
ers?"ladies and myself"?could have assumed that right afterMade
leine confesses her love, the pair go off and, Woodhouse continues:
marr[y], in right honest chaste & sober wise. But, as it is now

altered, as soon as M. has confessed her love, P. instead winds by
his arm round her, presses breast to breast, and acts all the
degrees
acts of a bon? fide husband. . . . tho' there are no ex
improper
21. See Martha Hale Shackford, "'The Eve of St. Agnes' and The Mysteries ofUdolpho,"
PMLA 36 (1921): 104-18, an account of the sources ofthat poem that Amy Lowell finds
less preposterous than others (which are, perhaps not incidentally, male-authored; Lowell,
a woman defends a woman's
reader of Keats, reading of Keats's reading of a woman).
See Lowell, John Keats (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925) 161-65. Com
pare the poem's penultimate stanza, for example, to this paradigmatic scene from The
. . . seemed like that made . . .
Mysteries: "The noise by the undrawing of rusty bolts.
She saw the door move, and then slowly open, and perceived something enter the room,
but the extreme duskiness prevented her distinguishing what itwas. ... It seemed to
glide along the remote obscurity of the apartment" (Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries ofUdolpho
[1794; Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1966] 260-61). The gothic setting of the poem
is indebted to Radcliffe and other gothic writers, as is the letter on the "Mansion ofMany
Apartments" with its dark doors and dark passages.
362 MARGARET HOMANS
. . . the Interest on
pressions but all is left to inference, and tho'
the reader's imagination is greatly heightened, yet I do apprehend
it will render the poem unfit for ladies, & indeed scarcely to be
mentioned to them among the "things that are. "?He says he does
not want ladies to read his poetry: that he writes for men?&
that if in the former poem there was an opening for doubt what
took place, itwas his fault for not writing clearly & comprehen
. . .
sibly?. (n: 163)
Although part of Byron's success with readers of both sexes came from
the eroticism of his poems, Woodhouse and John Taylor (to whom
Woodhouse was writing) assume that the poem, thus revised, goes over
the line from the innocent seductiveness of the valentine to the dangerous
seductions of Brown's story of the old woman and the devil.22 That the
poem is so repellently seductive turns out to be by design: Keats hopes
to exclude women readers. But would they necessarily have been re
pelled by such sexual boldness?
I have been implying here that Keats hopes thatwomen will not be
interested in his poem. But far from speculating accurately about what
women readers might feel, Keats and Woodhouse fail to speculate on
this subject at all. They focus instead on men as readers and as censors
of the reading specifically of "ladies." Woodhouse candidly reveals that
what would render the poem unfit for ladies makes itmore appealing
to him, that is,makes it sexually arousing: "the Interest on the reader's
"
imagination is greatly heightened. The poem might give proper ladies
a glimpse of sexual possibilities thatwould threatenmale authority over
them within marriage. Through his phrasing of the problem ("it will
render the poem unfit for ladies, &c indeed scarcely to be mentioned to
them"), Woodhouse claims for himself?and by extension, for other
male readers?the to control "ladies'" access to literature. In
power
deed (this seems to be Keats's weird promotional scheme) men will be
obliged to read the poem, in order to protect their ladies from it. Keats
has not so much made his to women readers, as
poem uninteresting
made it necessary as well as pleasurable for male readers to control its
distribution.
22. For a discussion see Chilcott

of the economic significance of this episode, 40-44.
On Keats's of seducing himself and his reader and inducing in his reader physical
way
sensations ("The Eve of St. Agnes" being an especially good instance of this tendency)
see Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974), especially
85-114 and 147. Ricks is not however concerned with the gender of the reader. I have
not been able to discover negative responses by Keats's female contemporaries; Ricks
describes the squeamish response of many male readers to Keats's sensuousness.
This notion that one might choose to exclude lady readers, and could
do so by making a poem sexually explicit (and could in the process
enhance one's own masculine authority), is echoed and clarified by a
statement made by (the admittedly prudish and unreliable) Brown in
1841 when sending to Richard Monckton Milnes four books of tran
scripts of Keats's poems: "You will find a poem in each of my books
of copies from his originals of an exceptionable kind; theywere written
and copied for the purpose of preventing the young blue-stocking ladies
from asking for the loan of his MS poems, and, through fathers and
brothers, had that effect."23 Even more than Keats's con
they clearly
versation with Woodhouse, this passage reveals a hostility to lady readers
that is paired with, and perhaps originates in, the idea of attracting them.
The sexual curiosity of daughters and sisters is aroused only so as to
provide a reason to invoke male authority (in the form of fathers and
brothers) to suppress it. Keats in writing the poems, and Brown in
copying them so strategically, enact their hostility to the necessity of
seducing the upper-class female reader, and they indirectly assert their
own masculine authority, and figuratively inflate their class status, by
making arousal lead to its denial at the hands of upper-class men.
The idea of the literary seduction of upper-class women and the view
that the aim of seduction is to bring into play an even more elite male
authority (that is, to make the writer's masculinity more authoritative
by reconstituting it as noble?more like Byron's, perhaps) inform fur
ther passages from the letters and emerge as the subtexts of several of
Keats's Dante's of Paolo and Francesca attracts him pow
poems. story
erfully, as he tells George and Georgiana later in the same long letter
that includes the story of the old woman and the devil. Keats has been
giving his pained account of the bogus love letters his brother Tom
received from their friend C. J.Wells posing as "Amena Bellefila," and
he meditates at length on the punishments he hopes for "the villain."
The thought of punishment for a literary seduction leads him to his
liking for the fifthCanto of the Inferno and to his dream of entering into
it,which he calls "one of themost delightful enjoyments I ever had in
my life?I floated about the whirling atmosphere . . .with a beautiful
to whose mine were as it seem'd for an ..."
figure lips joined age
(11:91). (Is Keats secretly attracted to such a seduction asWells's?) Next

he copies his sonnet on the dream, "As Hermes once took to his feathers
23- The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816-1878, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1948) 11: 103. Cited hereafter in the text as KC followed by volume and
pages.
364 MARGARET HOMANS
"
light. The sonnet sets up an analogy between Hermes lulling themon
ster Argus to sleep and the poet's "idle
spright" lulling to sleep the
"dragon world." Just as Hermes was then able to flee away, so the poet's
"spright" flees and goes to the second circle of Hell where, the sonnet
concludes, "Pale were the lips I kiss'd and fair the form / I floated with
about thatmelancholy storm?"(n: 91). Why, the poem asks us to ask,
does Keats graft themyth of Hermes and Argus onto Dante's
story?
Given the context of Wells's literary seduction of Tom, the poem
might have stressed the literary seduction of Paolo and Francesca. "A
Galeotto was that book, and he who wrote it," Dante has her say, but
the sonnet, like the dream that inspired it, included
only the lip-to-lip
whirling in the storm and omits Dante's account of how the lovers got
there. However, the story of a textual seduction that is omitted from
the latter part of the poem appears, displaced, in the earlier part. Hermes
has lulled Argus to sleep with "a delphic reed" (as in Ovid, where
Hermes tells him the soporific story of the pipes on which he
plays).
While theHermes section of the poem thus includes the verbal seduction
that the Paolo and Francesca section omits, Keats omits from theHermes
story something that his telling of the Paolo and Francesca story includes:
the sexual relation. In Ovid, but not in Keats, Hermes practices his
verbal seductions so as to kill Argus, who guards the
nymph Io (in the
form of a beautiful heifer) from Jove, who
eventually succeeds in se
ducing or perhaps raping her. Just as reading removes the defenses of
Paolo and Francesca, Hermes's "reed" removes Argus as defender of Io.
Through the chiasmus, while the verbal seduction left off from the
Paolo and Francesca in the Hermes the sexual
story reappears story,
relation leftout of theHermes story reappears in the Paolo and Francesca
story.
But the point of the chiasmus is its asymmetry. While the human
lovers are equally and mutually seduced, and while their love
challenges
the patriarchal ownership of women, the sexual relation between Jove
and Io to which that human love is structurally equated confirms pa
triarchal authority. In the "delightful enjoyment" of Keats's dream, the
moral authority and hierarchy of Dante's vision has been removed, yet
authority and hierarchy lurk at the poem's edges through the strange
engrafting of the Hermes story: the poem brings to mind Jove and Io
as the of the illicit lovers it foregrounds. Once again the textual
antitypes
seduction of a high-born woman brings forthmasculine authority, here
magnified through Jove's divinity. Like the sudden appearance of Jove
in the letter about the bee and the flower (and Keats is all the more
ready now to identify the poet with the "masculine" figure of Hermes/
Mercury from that letter), Jove's implicit presence on themargin of this
poem signals the recuperation of female sexuality for elite masculine

authority and authorship. Keats's non-moralizing identification with
Paolo is an instance of his negative capability, yet the subtext's opposi
tion to a woman's sexual freedom recalls the way Keats defends his
poetic stance against the potentially overpowering idea of intimacy with
a woman. Himself seduced?and thus feminized?by Dante's story, his
brother likewise seduced, victimized, and feminized by Wells, Keats
defensively enhances his masculinity through identification with the
authority of divinity and asserts that authority not only against the
power of women, but also against the lower-class "woman"
potential
he fears he himself may be.24 This gesture Keats chillingly repeats when,
writing to Fanny Brawne three months later, he recalls Francesca, but
to identify himself not with the loving Paolo but with Francesca's au
thoritarian husband. Quoting from Massinger's "Duke of Milan," he
inserts the name Francesca into theDuke's lines warning his wife Mar
celia not to betray him. Addressing thismisquotation to Fanny, Keats
rewrites Francesca tomake Fanny figuratively but doubly thewife of a
jealous and powerful husband, a woman of the nobility overpowered
an even more man.
by high-born
Keats's most
image of the woman reader occurs in another
striking
of the poems with "mother Radcliff" names, "The Eve of St. Mark."
A young woman named Bertha, who lives "in the old Minster Square"
of a cathedral town and who is, ifnot high-born, at least as leisured as
the "ladies" of Keats's putative readership, reads, presumably on the eve
of St. Mark, from
A curious volume, patch'd and torn,

That all day long, from earliest morn,
Had taken captive her two eyes
(25-27)
So intense is her concentration that the fading of the daylight does not
break it: she reads "With forehead 'gainst the window pane" (49) and
then by the light of the fire, which casts her "giant" shadow on the
walls behind her.
her shadow still

Glower'd about as itwould fill
The room with wildest forms and shades,
24- Both Wolfson and Hofkosh argue (about different texts) that at the end of his life
Keats sees himself feminized, in the position of being "ravished"; Wolfson, "Composition
and 'Unrest,'" 67; Hofkosh 109.
366 MARGARET HOMANS
As though some ghostly queens of spades

Had come to mock behind her back,
And dance, and ruffle their garments black.
(83-88)
The poem breaks off with a "quotation" not from the book itself, but
from itsmarginalia of "pious poesies," including a verse to the effect
that a mother who "Kepen in solitarinesse / And kissen devoute the
holy croce" can make her child "A saint er its nativitie." Bertha, reading
about sainthood and female chastity (the description of "her constant
eyelids" links her to the pious mother) is among the most chaste of
Keats's heroines, and many commentators have noted the re
poem's
straint and somberness. Yet the giant forms of Bertha's shadows, the
ghostly queens of spades who dance and ruffle behind her, belie that
restraint. Conflating the deathly ace of spades with the amorous queen
of hearts, these of monstrous, femaleness as
images powerful represent
the fear of death a terrifying sexuality. And because they result from
Bertha's fixed position by the flickering fire, they represent what is
released in her by her unnatural, obsessive reading. We noted earlier
Keats's hope that, by redescribing women's power over him as having
originated in their reading of him, he would be in the position of
imaginatively controlling that power. This process is dramatized here.
A demonic power is elicited from the otherwise chaste and sober Bertha,
but because it is brought out by her reading, she remains under the
of the text, which can harness this force to its doctrinaire
authority
purposes (when her eyes stray to themargin, they stray only into further
pieties).
The poem breaks off, but Keats continues it in a grotesquely comic
form, his last ambivalent one, a female
attempt?an again?to capture
audience. As various readers have noted, Bertha, her cathedral town
setting, and her book reappear in The Jealousies (Keats's preferred title
for the poem better known as The Cap and Bells).25 A commoner, but
"solid," Bertha Pearl is illicitly loved by Elfinan, the Emperor of the
fairies. Elfinan has been read as a figure for the Prince Regent or for
Byron or both, since each was, like Elfinan, royalty or nobility involved
in publicly scandalous sexual intrigues. While Elfinan is supposed to be
awaiting the arrival of his official fiancee, the fairyBellanaine, he secretly
flies off to visit Bertha Pearl. He carries with him a book, "an old /And
legend-leaved book, mysterious to behold" (512-13), that is endowed
with "the potent charm, /That shall drive Bertha to a fainting fit" (518
25- See, for example, Martin Halpern, "Keats and 'The Spirit that Laughest,'" Keats
Shelley Journal 15 (1966): 82.
19). Elfinan sets out on this mock quest on St. Mark's eve for, the
sorcerer Hum tells him, "on that eve alone can you themaid convey"
(504).
According to the satirical lens turned on it by The Jealousies, Bertha's
reading in "The Eve of St. Mark" is sexual: it seduces her, and it seduces
her on behalf of a royal and unearthly suitor. The original Bertha's
ancient and holy tome turns out to be a fairy Emperor's aid to seduction.
The suggestion of a monstrous female power in those shadowy "queens
of spades" thatmock the original Bertha ismade grotesquely explicit as
the sexuality thatHum's book will activate in Bertha Pearl, a sexuality
that exists for Elfinan. An amorphous, terrifying power released for no
clear purpose in the original becomes a submissive sexuality in the
revision. Like the sexual interest daughters and sisters might take in a
poem like "The Eve of St. Agnes," female sexuality is released here only
to reinforce the authority of themasculine purveyors of books. Bertha
Pearl has embroidered on her sampler the words, "Cupid, I / do thee
defy!" (455), but that Hum has captured it for Elfinan suggests the
inefficacy of her protest. The woman's own words will not outweigh
the seductive and controlling power of what a man gives her to read.
As in his attempted revisions to "The Eve of St. Agnes," Keats turned
his need to cater to female taste aggressively against his idea of the
highbrow woman reader. In the letter blaming "the offence the ladies
take at me" on his "to class women . . . with roses and
tendency
sweetmeats" he continues: "If I ever come to publish [The Jealousies],
there will be some delicate picking for squeamish stomachs" (11: 327
28). Keats will avenge his unpopularity on the supposed sources of it:
recalcitrant lady readers, women who object to objectification.
We have yet to note one of the most significant features of The
Jealousies, which is that it is written by a woman, or rather by Keats
writing as a woman: Lucy Vaughan Lloyd, of China Walk, Lambeth, a
woman whose dainty name and address identify her as a member of the
tribe of "sublime petticoats" who so irritateKeats by their sentimental
ism and their failure to buy his poems. That the pseudonym mattered
to Keats's conception of the poem is shown by his references to the
poem. To Charles Brown he writes, "I shall soon begin upon Lucy
Vaughan Lloyd" (11:299). And in the passage from which I just quoted, '
Keats actually writes, "If I ever come to publish 'Lucy Vaughan Lloyd,
"
therewill be. . . . Having spoken in Fanny's and Georgiana's voices,
"
having written poems with "fine mother Radcliff names, Keats again
appropriates a female voice in order to change a woman reader into a
sexual object, in order to reassert his own authority as a masculine
subject. Purporting to offer a woman's reading of a woman reading,
the poem makes a woman complicitous in the subordination of the
368 MARGARET HOMANS
woman reader tomasculine sexual and literary authority. Keats preempts

a woman's voice, and a woman to show what he could
shapes reader,
perhaps never get Fanny herself to say, that women are Beauty and
as the of men's under male
belong, objects gaze, proprietorship. And
that reading the poetry of Keats can bring about this transformation.
If it seems disappointing to end with the suggestion that this little
liked poem somehow culminates any tendency of Keats's, we might
return briefly to The Fall of Hyperion, which, as I have suggested,
dramatizes the transformation of a fearsome reader-critic into a woman
open to being read. Keats may have given up on The Fall in September
1819, shortly after the time of the anguished letters to Fanny Brawne
through which we first looked at the poem; but Charles Brown places
the poem in the later autumn 1819, when he recalls Keats working
pleasurably on The Jealousies in the mornings, then in the evenings
*
"deeply engaged in remodelling his poem of'Hyperion' into a Vision'"
(KC 11: 71-72).26 If The Jealousies is not only a comic continuation of
"The Eve of St. Mark" but also (as Halpern suggests) a daylight alter
native to the somber Fall (if The Fall is a somber, evening version of
The Jealousies), we might think of the vicissitudes ofMoneta's power in
the context of Bertha Pearl's failure to resist seduction by the book.
Moneta is too grand for seduction, yet she is induced (by the speaker
poet's willingness to suffer) to open her womb-brain to him, and her
so enhances his authority as a poet (even though that authority is
doing
defined through his very mortal weakness). Through the poem's care
fully orchestrated and undecidable epistemological reversals, Moneta's
initial dominance as a reader is subdued, and the very grandeur of
Moneta and of this process dignifies themale authority that neutralizes
thewoman reader in a way that The Jealousies could not.
As Keats's motive for treating women and especially lady readers as
he does, I have stressed his resentment of their real and imagined power
over him and his wish to assert his own masculine au
compensatory
thority. But that assertion of masculinity accomplishes a further aim for

him. By invoking an exclusively male readership, by writing only for
men, he makes of his poetry a masculine preserve, and in so doing he
elects himself a member of the male club that poets in the classical
tradition, and especially the high romantics, have always claimed liter
ature to be, but which it is not. Ifwe recall Lockhart's insulting review,
26. Aileen Ward (and Halpern with her) trusts Charles Brown's assertion that Keats
was working on The Fall ofHyperion in the autumn of 1819, at the time he wrote The
Jealousies; Bate, Bush, Gittings and most others discount Brown's assertion and place the
poem no later than the summer of 1819.
we can see why this move might have been crucial for Keats. By
asserting his membership in highbrow literature as an exclusively male
club, Keats would dissociate himself from the category?female, lower
class, and desexualized?in which Lockhart places him: "there is scarcely
a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of
lyrics behind in her band-box." Twentieth-century male literary critics
of high romanticism such as Harold Bloom have succeeded in fulfilling
Keats's wish, by stressing his place in the line ofMilton andWordsworth
and by effacing his sources in the writings of women such as Mary
Tighe and Ann Radcliffe. It is not only his sense of powerlessness with
respect to supposedly powerful women thatmotivates Keats in his quest
for a male readership; it is also his fear of sharing in the cultural pow
erlessness of women themselves.
We have seen how Keats's association with governesses might have
become especially galling to him in the light of his susceptibility to other
kinds of feminization, as when he finds himself seduced by Dante. But
it remains for us to glance at one final context for Keats's feminization
and his defenses against it. Fanny Brawne's surviving letters, not to
Keats but about him after his departure for Italy, uncannily repeat some
of the features of his earlier correspondence with her. Though we infer
from his letters to her that hers while he was alive were resolutely anti
romantic, once or twice in these later letters her language about him is
as intensely romantic as his own had been about her: "If I am to lose
him I lose everything" (Brawne 20). Matching his refusal to read her
"
last letters to him ("he reads no letters for fear of agitating himself,
Brawne 21; "to see her hand writing would break my heart," 11: 351
52) is her unwillingness?which she mentions several times?to reread
his works or anything about him. For Fanny Keats she has copied out
Severn's account of Keats's death, but she has "not looked at it since"
and suggests "if you would rather not make yourself again unhappy, do
not read it" (Brawne 32). Sending to Fanny an issue of The Indicator
containing two of his poems she writes, "I never open it for he is
connected with every page" (Brawne 55). If Fanny Brawne begins to
sound like Keats, Keats a shadow-resemblance to the
Fanny gains figure
she once made in his letters. Although she cannot bear to read his books,
she passes them on to the poet's sister together with his literary opinions
(she urges Fanny to read "King Lear" in the original, she explains Keats's
views of Byron), taking up his role of literary mentor to them both.
Her letters sometimes open or close with "my dearest girl," one of his
own ways of addressing her, and at her moment of greatest
anxiety
about him she writes, "God bless you my dearest girl" (Brawne 23),
words common enough yet also echoing Keats's own lastwords to her.
370 MARGARET HOMANS
Most strikingly, the expression of her mourning for him takes the
form of modes of privatization that recall his own. She writes of her
own reclusiveness following his death and of a secretiveness about Keats
that rivals his about her: "To no one but you would Imention him. I
will suffer no one but you to speak of him. They are too uninterested
in him to have any right tomention what is to you and me, so great a
loss" (Brawne 31-32). In a letter written in 1829 reluctantly granting
Charles Brown permission to publish Keats's poems about her, she
writes, "Without claiming too much constancy for myself Imay truly
say that he is well-remembered by me and that satisfied with that I
could wish no one else but myself knew he had even existed. "27 In the
context of this Keatsian, possessive privacy another passage from that
letter, often quoted out of context to "damage" Fanny Brawne, makes
sense: "I fear the kindest act would be to let him rest for ever in the
"28But
obscurity towhich unhappy circumstances have condemned him.
she is not all possessiveness: she goes on to defend Keats and to write
of "the duty of those who loved and valued him to vindicate him."
Has Brawne, in an enactment of Keats's most
Fanny paranoid
thoughts, taken textual revenge by stealing his voice and transforming

him, as he once transformed her, into the feminine object of a jealous
possessiveness, his words appropriated as he once appropriated hers?
Or, to the contrary, has he so fully succeeded in appropriating her voice
that he now speaks through her, ventriloquizing her as he did during
his life, now all the more effectively because sorrow has lowered her
resistance? As in our discussion of Moneta's power relative to the poet,
it is difficult to say. Yet the publication history of these writings (his

letters to her, establishing her unworthiness, and the "damaging" quo
tation from her letter appeared in the 1870's, while her letters did not
come out until 1937, and were discredited when theywere first reported
on by Amy Lowell in 1925), together with the fact that her existence in
posterity is a function of his, serve?like the effect of the framing double
dream on Moneta's authority in The Fall ofHyperion?to make Fanny
Brawne's voice forever the echo of his own. His fears were finally
groundless.
Yale University
27- Fanny Brawne's draft of her letter is printed in The Letters ofJohn Keats, ed. Maurice
Buxton Forman (ist ed. 1931; 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1947) lxii-lxiv; this quotation
and the next two, lxiii.
28. Sir Charles Dilke was first quoted this sentence out of context, in The Papers of a
Critic (London, 1875) 1: 11; citing this misquotation to indicate its "damaging" effect on
Brawne's reputation, Rollins quotes it twice, each time, again, out of context: KC xlviii.

Keats Negative Cap

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Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats

Author(s): Margaret Homans

Keats Reading Women,

paper began as an inquiry into women readers of Keats and

This the complex resistance?to borrow Judith Fetterley's term?they

(Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1978).

SiR, 29 (Fall 1990)

iety to distinguish him from them, if gender is a social construct, and

Two more recent readers of Keats, Adrienne Rich and Barbara

Charlesworth Gelpi, make something of the same point about Keats

3. Z[John Gibson Lockhart], "The Cockney School of Poetry," Blackwood's Edinburgh

tions of social power as raised by Colvin and Lockhart. In a transcribed

might be a negative way of describing the fact that women have

These two women, readers of Keats, make him an woman

Christine Froula has pointed out, our original myth of creativity

busyness of Mercury. No one could be less passive or flower-like than

I hope I shall never marry. . . .The mighty abstract Idea I have of

pliance would spoil everything. Although he declares that it is his idea

Although he viewed the public in general as an "Enemy" (see 1: 266-67

the chief consumers of literature. Moreover, class difference often mag

Quite possibly, the state of affairs depicted in this passage is not so

to be the compensatory, defensive forms taken by Keats's feeling of

almost certainly felt Keats himself was?later, sending the Spenser to

as object of desire who is

thing to admire in me especially as far as sight goes?I cannot be

mires?by limiting Fanny to being the object of his vision, by appro

Just as Keats's appropriation of Fanny's voice has its forgivable pathos,

specifically female activities.

Haydon?yes your wife will say, 'here is a sum total account of

He defeats her supposed will to intervene by occupying the space she

12. I am indebted here to Paul de Man,

threat to his identity?a sense of identity he scarcely thought he wanted,

The Fall ofHyperion involves a more complex instance of a poet

of women's need to resist the dangerous misrepresentations of them in androcentric writing

and literal instance of negative capability (he is almost telepathically

admire his heroism as a poet; yet because Moneta is initially a mother

begins with news of writing "The Eve of St. Agnes"?then of women

The emotional oscillations of this series of passages appear to me

marr[y], in right honest chaste & sober wise. But, as it is now

Apartments" with its dark doors and dark passages.

22. For a discussion see Chilcott

(11:91). (Is Keats secretly attracted to such a seduction asWells's?) Next

poem signals the recuperation of female sexuality for elite masculine

A curious volume, patch'd and torn,

her shadow still

As though some ghostly queens of spades

Shelley Journal 15 (1966): 82.

woman reader tomasculine sexual and literary authority. Keats preempts

thority. But that assertion of masculinity accomplishes a further aim for

thoughts, taken textual revenge by stealing his voice and transforming

it is difficult to say. Yet the publication history of these writings (his

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