Sometimes I will discover that two different works start talking to each other simply because I happen to be teaching them both at the same time. This week Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (from my Jane Austen first year seminar) and John Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes (from my British fantasy course) engaged in one of these conversations. I saw both instructing my students in how to deal with fantasy.
I have written several times on how young people can get absorbed in fantasy worlds. In the late 18th and early 19th century worlds, gothic novels such as Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho drew them in.A year ago, I wrote about how a student with many infirmities once reflected on her own “escape” into, and then out of, the world of Jane Austen.
It was an inspiring story. Born three months early, Erin had several physical problems, including a frozen larynx that caused her to speak with a rasp. Suffering ridicule from from her fellow students, she took refuge in reading but eventually (by her senior year in college) came to see reading as a potential trap if one didn’t approach it with the proper perspective. Therefore she related to Austen’s ambivalence about gothic novels in Northanger Abbey, how they are both useful but ultimately limiting. You can read the whole story here, here, and here.
Young people today become involved in fantasies no less than does Catherine Morland, Austen’s heroine. In addition to Harry Potter and Twilight, there are films (say, Titanic), video games, and any other number of fictional experiences. Parents worry today just as they did in 1805. In Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s mother tries to give her what she considers wholesome reading alternatives, including “The Beggar’s Petition” and an essay by Henry McKenzie entitled “Consequences to little folks of intimacy with great ones.” McKenzie’s message is, essentially, “watch out!” and “The Beggar’s Petition” contains such passages as the following:
Pity the sorrows of a poor old man
Whose trembling limbs have borne him to your door,
Whose days are dwindled to the shortest span—
Oh, give relief, and heaven will bless your store.
However worthy its sentiments, the poem does not exactly capture the imagination of 17-year-old Catherine.In fact, she puts up a kind of passive resistance, and Austen describes her (in jest) as “inattentive” and “stupid” for her inability to memorize the 25-stanza poem over a three-month period.(Lewis Carroll is similarly sympathetic with children forced to memorize long moralistic poetry that is supposedly good for them.)
Yet despite giving herself over to gothics, Catherine comes out all right. So will our children.
Madeline in Eve of St. Agnes is swept up in her own fantasy, and her transition from fantasy to reality is not unlike Catherine’s. Keats’ gorgeous poem is a medieval romance that is so enigmatic and suggestive that scholar Jack Stillinger lists 59 different interpretations of it. However one read Eve of St. Agnes, it grabs the attention.
Madeline is surrounded by her father’s debauched court but is so focused on the rituals of the Eve of St. Agnes that she floats above it. The old stories say that if a young maid fasts on St. Agnes’s Eve, she will dream of her lover, so that is what Madeline does. Little does she know that her lover Porphyro, even though he risks being killed by her father if he is discovered, has come to see her. When he realizes what night it is, he plans a “stratagem”: he will show up by her bedside while she is dreaming. He assumes she will be dreaming of him, which in fact proves to be the case.
Interpretations of the poem range from seeing Porphyro as a pilgrim on a spiritual quest to regarding him as a peeping Tom and a stalker who deflowers her (or as some scholars put it, rapes her), taking advantage of the fact that she thinks she’s still dreaming.
In defense of the word “deflower,” Keats uses flower imagery to describe their sexual intercourse. The poet is so indirect that most modern readers at first miss that the two have sex. Here’s how Keats puts it:
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet—
Solution sweet . . .
Anyway, back to fantasy. When she awakes (although she may not be sure she is awake), Madeline is disappointed that Porphyro doesn’t live up to her dreams of him:
“Ah, Porphyro!” said she, “but even now”
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How changed thou art! How pallid, chill, and drear!
Then, after they have sex and she realizes that she really is awake, her first response is to despair. We have the sense that we may be reading something akin to Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece where the maiden will be ruined as the man leaves. A wintry storm outside reinforces the potential bleakness:
‘Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw-blown sleet:
“This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!”
‘Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:
“No dream, alas! Alas! And woe is mine!
Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine—
Cruel! What traitor could thee hither bring?
But then, not unlike the transition Catherine makes in Northanger Abbey (albeit is less dramatic circumstances), Madeline deals with the changed reality. “I curse not,” she goes on to say, “for my heart is lost in thine.”
Porphyro, meanwhile, proves willing to move on to a real married relationship (at least as I read the poem). “Let us away, my love, with happy speed,” he says, and they ride out together into the storm. Which is to say, into life:
They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
Where lay the porter, in uneasy sprawl,
With a huge empty flagon by his side:
The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eyes an inmate owns:
By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide:
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.
And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
The poem is famous (or notorious) for its decidedly unromantic ending. Indeed, it could be seen as anti-romantic. The last lines shift from the lovers to two aged figures from the poem, a reminder that love, when it leaves the world of fantasy, enters into the realm of mutability:
That night, the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form
Of Witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be-nightmared. Angela the old
Died palsy-twitched, with meager face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.
I take something positive from this, however. Regardless of how the relationship is consummated (I put aside the rape debate, in other words), Madeline moving into life is a step forward for her. Virginal fantasies, like gothic fantasies (whether Mysteries of Udolpho or Twilight), are fine for young people.It helps them get through the tumult of adolescence and all the conflicting signals they get from their society, their religion, their raging hormones, and their emerging identities.
And then they get to have a relationship in the wind and the snow. Now that’s a journey that sounds real, substantive, and worthwhile!