| In the past twenty years, women writers, hitherto ignored by the canon, have emerged as a force to be considered in Romanticism. Indeed, scholarship on the works of female authors has served to further complicate the ongoing debate concerning the very definition of the term. As texts by women have begun to be considered, so too have new events been introduced into critical dialogue. In Romantic scholarship, the French Revolution has long been deemed the pivotal experience of the era, ushering in a focus on the free individual with natural, inalienable rights; however, occurring parallel to this and with equally far reaching implications was the Atlantic slave trade.;In 1788, Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams, and Ann Yearsley responded to hearings in British parliament on abolition. In these poems, each woman struggles to claim her place in the literary sphere as she positions herself both in tandem and contradiction to her African subjects. More shows greater concern for the British soul than she does for the slave's suffering and Williams begins with sensibility and ends with acquiescence, deviating from More in language but not in endeavor. Of the three, Ann Yearsley is the most unconventional, for instead of appealing through a valorization of the domestic, she forges a bond between self-constructed authority and male sympathy. In pleading their case, these women at times transgress, crossing the line of sympathy and entering the realm of appropriation; however, these women imagined it firstly as a benevolent act and secondly as a supplement to experience and authority.;Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams, and Ann Yearsley diverge on many points, but what they share is their insistence to perform the authorship they imagine. In my mind's eye, Romanticism is built upon desire, a desire to ultimately touch that which humans must imagine into being in order to reclaim. In search of full authority, these women may have taken from those who had little to spare, but they at least can be defended and understood as transforming appropriation through subjectivity and hurling it at the feet of their mutual captors. |
