Flashing Eyes And Floating Hair Romantic Muses And Mesmeric Medusas

This project examines the connections among Romantic-era improvisational poetry, the nineteenth-century cultural practice of mesmerism, and the mythical Medusa as an icon of the gendered gaze. An examination of what I call the trope of Medusan mesmerism in the poetry of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and the prose of Mary Shelley reveals that these Romantic-era writers equate the enraptured state that produces spontaneous literary creation with the mesmeric trance. Furthermore, these writers employ Medusan imagery to portray both the mesmerist and the mesmerized subject, a conflation of subject/object positions that complicates issues of agency, subjectivity, and gender. Images of Medusan mesmerism ultimately work to deconstruct Romantic ideological dichotomies of self/other, female/male, muse/artist, and sublime/beautiful. Exploring the Romantic myth of spontaneous literary creativity, I argue that Romantic-era women writers style themselves as improvisatrices by imagining and writing themselves in the mesmerized subject position in order to negotiate issues of agency, voice, and power in a male-dominated literary marketplace. In contrast to a traditional, masculinized Romantic discourse that emphasizes self-possession, I uncover a feminized, improvisational, Romantic discourse, characterized by what I call "Other-possession," an assumption of the mesmerized subject position that enhances subjective fluidity.