The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame

Stuart’s Laureates I 181

Miss Debby’s preferred mode of attack is teaching her parrot to repeat

slanderous gossip in order “to vex a young and pretty neighbour” (22).

When her neighbors finally drive the old woman and her parrot out

of town, the wealthy Debby manages to find a suitably cantankerous

spouse who takes pride in the fact that his wife is so unattractive that

he need not doubt her fidelity. Debby receives her comeuppance as the

now- neglected parrot resumes his innuendoes and insinuations, so the

jealous husband presumes his wife to be guilty and beats her mercilessly.

Apparently approving, Tabitha blandly reports, “And many a drubbing

DEBBY bought / For mischief she her PARROT taught” (77–8). The

moral finally is that “Slander turns against its maker” (79).

For all of the bawdy fun in these poems, the Tabitha Bramble

poems reveal a satirical hostility toward women that one might easily

construe as misogyny.^9 In “The Granny Grey,” for instance, another

old gossip receives her just deserts, this time for interfering in her

granddaughter’s love life. Like Miss Debby, Dame Dowson, though

not a spinster, delights in gossip: “Scandal,” Tabitha informs us, was

“her pleasure and her trade” (2: 87; 10). Jealous of her granddaugh-

ter’s beauty and her handsome beau, the “Granny Grey” demands

that the girl swear a vow of chastity, although she is certain it will fail.

“But LOVE, with cunning all his own, / Would never let the Maid

alone,” so the girl succumbs to her desire and arranges “an assigna-

tion” with her lover in the woods (49–50, 57). The old woman sus-

pects as much and waits “to spoil their merriment” (65). The young

Edwin, however, spies the dame and summons all his neighbors to

watch him humiliate her. As he ironically proceeds to make love to

the old woman, she succumbs to her desire—“And she was too much

charm’d to be / In haste to end the comedy” (85–86) —at which

point the crowd burst from their hiding places and carry the morti-

fied old woman “in triumph,” jeering at her “with wanton jests, and

sportive songs” until she repents and consents to the union of the

lovers (87–100). The moral of this tale is that old women should not

interfere with the love affairs of young people. While these tales are

amusing enough for newspaper poetry, they are also at odds with

Robinson’s other, more humanitarian messages because, as Tabitha

Bramble at least, she approves of the humiliation and punishment of

sexually repressed old women. But Tabitha’s satire is not directed only

at old women: in both “The Confessor” and “The Fortune- Tel ler ”

she exposes the tendencies of lascivious young women, too. In the

former poem, an unfaithful wife Bridget and her lover are interrupted

by her little boy who wonders who the man is in his father’s bed;

she tells him it is the local priest come to hear confession. When the

9780230100251_06_ch04.indd 1819780230100251_06_ch04.indd 181 12/28/2010 11:08:53 AM12/28/2010 11:08:53 AM

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