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Reviews

S i m o n B a i n b r i d g e , British Poetry and theRevolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003. Pp. xii 1 259. $74.

The French Revolution had its British counter-part in an explosion of “paper bullets” during the 1790s, pamphletsmobilized in a war of ideas. Major critical projects stem from this“war,” including M. H. Abrams’s supernaturalism and Tilottama Ra-jan’s historicism. What of the real bullets in the wars with France(1793–1815) that killed an astonishing 314,000 Britons? These warsoccupied the youth of Byron, the young maturity of Wordsworth andmaturity of Charlotte Smith, the infancy unto adulthood of the Shel-leys, Felicia Hemans, and Keats. Yet until this 2003 book by SimonBainbridge—forecast in his and others’ work in Romantic Wars: Stud-ies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822, edited by Philip Shaw (Burling-ton, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000)—the French wars have not supplied a criticalvocabulary for Romantic writing. Shaw’s Waterloo and the RomanticImagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and J. R. Watson’sRomanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and theNapoleonic Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) are absorbingreading, but they do not confront critical challenges the way thatBainbridge’s British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Warsdoes—challenges principally of a gendered discourse posed most fa-mously for the period’s history in a work that Bainbridge acknowl-edges, Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (NewHaven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992).

In her own landmark study “Coming Home: The Public Spacesof Romantic War” (Studies in Romanticism, 33 [1994], 539– 48), MaryA. Favret enlisted noted imaginative writers Samuel Taylor Coleridgeand Thomas De Quincey as critics of a public discourse that, in medi-ating war, obscured its cost. For imaginative writers who would revealthat cost, she turned to previously unknown (and often female) au-thors of street ballads collected by Betty Bennett in her British War Po-etry in the Age of Romanticism, 1793–1815 (New York: Garland, 1976).

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Bainbridge takes up Favret’s question of war’s mediation, arguing thatan array of noted writers did, after all, use a Romantic imagination toconvey rather than obscure the realities of war— or in Scott’s case,even to create those realities. The discourse of war that emerges heremoves in waves of feminization and masculinization, and Bainbridgeuses his array of writers, now inclusive of gender, to expose and oftendemystify this gendered discourse of war.

Bainbridge advances his discussion by engaging all of his co-contributors to Shaw’s collection (Stephen Behrendt, JacquelineLabbe, and six others). In contrast, Shaw’s own Waterloo and the Ro-mantic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995) en-gages but half of these and takes up none of the women writers whoaid Behrendt and others in grappling with gendered discourse. Bain-bridge’s valuable 1995 Napoleon and English Romanticism covered itstopic without mentioning Mary Shelley’s Napoleonic Castruccio inValperga, but in British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic WarsBainbridge places Smith and Hemans on an equal footing with Co-leridge and Byron. At points in this book, a gendering of discoursemeant to be intellectually freeing moves a bit quickly into assumptionsabout sexual difference that beg for proof. In this, Bainbridge doesno worse than many an explorer of gender in Romantic culture. Andhe has certainly done his homework among the best of exemplars inthis field: Marlon Ross, Anne Mellor, Julie Ellison, Diego Saglia, GaryKelly, and Susan Wolfson.

Bainbridge’s first chapter, an overview, counters Favret by bring-ing noted poetry into direct contact with the realities of war. MaryRobinson’s “The Camp” mimetically depicts a military camp of thelate 1790s, and (in the chapter’s leading anecdote) Walter Scott’s TheLady of the Lake is read during an artillery fight in the Peninsular War.In the chapter’s earlier examples, an eighteenth-century “Fancy”transports poet and reader to the field, fostering an anti-war sensibilityalert to war’s costs, while after 1800 a pro-war vigor emerges to resistand then impose that cost in its turn, defensively and offensively. Inchapter 2, Smith and Coleridge in their 1790s work The Emigrants and“Fears in Solitude” use imagination to empathize with the wounds ofwar and deprivations of exile. They further conjure protective figures,maternal and paternal, for both the home front and the alien settle-ment camp.

In chapter 3 a new anti-war vocabulary emerges, much the prop-erty of Robert Southey, who in the 1790s contributes not a maternalbut a maiden figure, Joan of Arc. A dialogue with Wordsworth’s LyricalBallads moves Southey further into an epic vocabulary that opposes

feminine sensibility. In chapter 4, coinciding with the invasion scaressurrounding the Peace of Amiens, Wordsworth himself injects “manly”vigor into a poetry that “called the nation to arms” (p. 103): he mas-culinizes the sonnet, once associated with Gray, Smith, and sensibility.For his sonnets on Venice and Bonaparte, Bainbridge argues, Words-worth also colonizes the maternal lately developed by Smith.

Chapter 5 foregrounds Walter Scott, who for Bainbridge com-pletes the masculinizing of war poetry in a roughened, “picturesque”form of chivalric romance viewed even as Homeric by Francis Jeffrey.The book’s central yet most exceptional figure, Scott made war famil-iar to a wide British audience but mystified it too in tales of past ro-mance: for Bainbridge, Scott never portrayed present conflict withconviction. This reader wondered if the great Minstrel’s romance ofmilitarization should be an example of an obfuscating “paper shield”and not the direct portrayal of war that Bainbridge is seeking. Thestakes are high, for the book’s Epilogue credits Scott with influencingBritain’s and America’s development as “warrior nations” (p. 225)—including his contribution of the presidential salute song, “Hail to theChief.”

Chapter 6 might be the book’s most compelling section, with its sampler of four poets on the Peninsular War (Hemans, Scott, By-ron, and Southey), among whom Scott and Southey mythologizeNapoleon’s incursion in Spain as the long-ago sexualized fall of Rod-erick’s Gothic Spain to the Moors. The young Hemans balances leg-endary romance and contemporary militarization in her 1808 En-gland and Spain. Scott experiments with a topical present in poems on Roderick and Waterloo but ends with a full-scale reversion to ro-mance. Byron forwards sublimity and elegy and a woman warrioreroticized, Southey a gendering of war in which woman is by turnsmaternal victim and seductive villain and man (Roderick) an abuserredeemed to prophesy Spain’s resistance to Napoleon.

Siege is the subject of chapter 7, as Byron and Hemans mount po-etic studies of war’s force that allude to historical sieges of Carthage,Murcia, Valencia, Constantinople, Rome, Corinth, Ismail, and Sara-gossa. Byron shows how the besieger, even the effeminate Don Juan, be-comes dehumanized, a machine of war. Hemans has the besieged fight-ing famine and pestilence, a war on women’s terms in which a male“warrior class” is useless (p. 196). The feminization suffered by He-mans’s male governor in The Siege of Valencia interests Bainbridge less,however, than woman as failed leader at the city walls (Ximena) or,worse, temporizer with the enemy (Elmina). In discussing The Siege andThe Wife of Asdrubal by Hemans, Bainbridge seems troubled by non-

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normative female roles and misses these works’ critical and propheticovertones (the Valencian governer and his wife in debate over mater-nity and paternity in war; the wife of Carthage’s governor bearing theepithet “Pythian” ). A mystified vocabulary of “soul” (male) and “heart”(female) structures this section, making this reader wish for the au-thor’s acquaintance with Susan Wolfson’s essay (not cited here), “Gen-dering the Soul,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices,edited by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, N.H.:Univ. Press of New England, 1995), pp. 33–68. Bainbridge discernsthe way in which gendered discourse can be revelatory—but he doesnot completely avoid the way it can seem prescriptive and adopt no-tions of masculinity and femininity as givens. In discussing Hemans’sThe Last Constantine, Bainbridge slides into blaming the victim, sug-gesting that Constantinople was defeated because it was effeminate,not (as others including myself have argued) that it was feminized bydefeat. If gender preexists history in this way, then gendered discourseis denied its power as a historical phenomenon. On another point,since, as Bainbridge concedes, the wars with France were not particu-larly characterized by siege, the chapter might acknowledge genderedcontingencies of battle conducted in the open field as in Hemans’s“Woman on the Field of Battle.”

I point to the perils of gendered discourse here and call for fur-ther material instances of gender in war; but I also wish to credit thestrides that Bainbridge has taken toward inclusion of Romantic-erawriting and his admirable possession of current, relevant criticism.Further, I credit this book’s many intriguing notes about the gender-ing of particular literary and aesthetic ingredients in discourse(genre, meter, figure-ground relations) and its many telling notes onwriters more briefly glimpsed: Anne Yearsley, Hannah Cowley, AnnBarbauld, John Wilson Croker, Thomas Campbell, and Walter SavageLandor. I applaud this freshly engaged work.

Nanora SweetUniversity of Missouri-St. Louis

C h r i s t o p h I r m s c h e r , Longfellow Redux.Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Pp. xx 1350. $40.

One’s impression is that Longfellow has settledpermanently into the compact shelving—that he has been gathering

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