The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

The English Sappho 139

Petrarchan subjectivity conditioned by literature of Sensibility. Like

Gertrude, the heroine of her novel The False Friend, Sappho is “the

victim of sensibility”—that novel’s final and fatal words (6: 228,

408). Sappho and Phaon does not finally validate Sappho’s excessive

sensibility, nor does it corroborate the portrayal of Petrarch as an

icon of Sensibility, in contrast to what Robinson does with the fig-

ure of Petrarch in “Petrarch to Laura.” The dangers of sensibility

are a consistent theme in Robinson’s later work. Indeed, Robinson’s

subsequent novels—Walsingham, The False Friend, and The Natural

Daughter—all develop around the dangers of “excessive sensibility,”

a phrase she frequently employs. Her male protagonist Walsingham,

for instance, blames his misfortunes on “the miseries of sensibility”

(5: 7). But, like Jane Austen, Robinson understood well that sensibil-

ity posed particular dangers to women: as Gertrude writes in a letter

to a friend, “We are the victims of our own sensibility”; and echo-

ing the exultation of Love over Reason in Sappho and Phaon, this

character also exclaims, “Oh, sensibility! thou curse to woman! thou

bane of all our hopes, thou source of exultation to our tyrant man!”

(6: 225, 327). Robinson, moreover, considered herself in this light;

as she writes in the Memoirs, “every event of my life has more or less

been marked by the progressive evils of a too acute sensibility” (7:

196). According to Robinson’s recounting of the narrative, Sappho

suffers a similar fate, but Robinson’s deployment of the poet- narrator

reclaims the female subjectivity from the degenerative impulse of

“too acute sensibility.”

Still, this is not, strictly speaking, tragedy. As a sonnet sequence,

Sappho and Phaon recovers the playfulness of English Renaissance

poets’ engagements with Petrarch’s tradition, with a similar spirit

of irony and touches of (self- )parody. The brilliance of Robinson’s

sequence is that she consistently demonstrates her ability to perform

a multivalent poetics that is both lascivious and disapproving, while

also dexterously avoiding the implication of herself in Sappho’s fate.

In other words, Robinson knows that paeans to chastity and rea-

son do not make for successful sonnets, regardless of the potential

risks. Erotic tension is finally fundamental to the Petrarchan tra-

dition. Sappho and Phaon is practically a psychomachia of internal

conf lict between reason and passion, but it is also the sexiest poem

Robinson ever wrote because the psychosexual always predominates.

The sequence manages nonetheless to maintain an ironic or fre-

quently ambiguous detachment from its subject, even as it variously

disapproves of or sympathizes with Sappho’s dilemma. Even when

Robinson voices Sappho, she distances herself from the poet- character.

9780230100251_05_ch03.indd 1399780230100251_05_ch03.indd 139 12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM12/28/2010 11:08:42 AM

10.1057/9780230118034 - The Poetry of Mary Robinson, Daniel Robinson

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