By Rachel Schulkins
Analyzing John Keats's remodeling of the romance style, Rachel Schulkins argues that he's responding to and critiquing the beliefs of female modesty and asexual femininity encouraged within the early 19th century. via shut readings of Isabella; or the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia and 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' Schulkins bargains a re-examination of Keats and his poetry designed to illustrate that Keats's sexual imagery counters conservative morality via encoding taboo wants and the pleasures of masturbation. In so doing, Keats provides a model of lady sexuality that undermines the traditional proposal of the asexual lady. Schulkins engages with feminist feedback that mostly perspectives Keats as a misogynist poet who's threatened via the female's overwhelming sexual and artistic presence. Such feedback, Schulkins exhibits, has a tendency in the direction of a troublesome identity among poet and protagonist, with the textual content visible as an instantaneous rendering of authorial ideology. Such an interpretation neither distinguishes among writer, protagonist, textual content, social norms and cultural background nor recognises the socio-sexual and political undertones embedded in Keats's rendering of the feminine. eventually, Schulkins's booklet finds how Keats's sexual politics and his refutation of the asexual woman version fed the layout, plot and vocabulary of his romances
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Example text
On reading Hyperion, Hunt observes that there is ‘something too effeminate and human in the way Apollo receives the exaltation which his wisdom is giving him. He weeps and wonders somewhat too fondly’ (Indicator 2 [9 Aug 1820]: 352). In his essay ‘On Effeminacy of Character’ (1822), William Hazlitt refers to Keats’s poetry as a prime example of effeminacy, which he defines accordingly: Effeminacy of character arises from a prevalence of the sensibility over the will; or it consists in a want of fortitude … instead of voluntarily embracing pain, or labour, or danger, or death, lovers of ‘exquisite indulgences’ want every sensation wound up to the highest pitch of voluptuous refinement, every motion must be grace and elegance; they live in a luxurious endless dream.
It is the argument of this book that through its employment of masturbation and erotic imagery, Keats’s work can be located in this wider liberal-conservative debate regarding sexual freedom and more specifically female sexuality. Both Lockhart and Crocker objected to Keats’s sensual lyrics on account of its political association with Hunt’s politics and liberalism, thus addressing the poetry from a sexual-political-conservative stance. In many ways, as I argue in Chapter 1, the backlash against Keats’s poetry was emanating from conservatives who found Keats’s sexual themes as politically and socially destabilising.
Keats relates the lady’s sighs more with sexual pleasure than discomfort, thus uncovering the sexual and erotic gestures masked under the display of modesty. The lady’s sigh indicates that she is familiar with the impact her innocent gestures have on the opposite sex, which renders her through the eyes of Keats as nothing more than a teasing coquette who wants to arouse male desire and not to shy away from it. As the poem advances towards its last two stanzas, Keats explicitly asks the lady for sexual favours: Will you play once more, at nice-cut-core, For it only will last our youth out; And we have the prime of the kissing time, We have not one sweet tooth out.