Throughout human history, the moon has long served as a figure or symbol in various cultures. It is not uncommon for the moon to be associated with theological or mythological entities. Common too, is that the personification of the moon as that of a feminine figure. European personifications of the moon, such as the Greek titan Selene and the Roman Luna, are reflective of this. It would then be no surprise that British Romantic writers would draw inspirations from this cultural sentiment to personify the moon in a similar way. Romanticism is focused heavily on the artist’s personal and genuine display of emotion as ways to communicate their experience as a human being to broaden sympathies and understanding. More, the romantic era writers and artists began to expand into the field of creating works that showed sympathy for the intellectually disabled as it further challenged the ideas and definitions of normality, individuality, and experience that came from prior literature and society (Bradshaw, 1). The Gothic era that succeeded the Romantic Era is often pointed to more as the beginning of contemporary disability literature and the social model of disability, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein one of the key pieces in the transition (Bradshaw, 4), however, Bradshaw notes that the romantic era “[…] is held to be a contested transitional period in cultural perceptions of disability […](2). Romantic era works can be debatable on a case-to-case basis on whether they fit more into the medical model or social model of disabilities, but as a transitional period for disability in literature they often blur the line. On maternity in romantic era works, Julie Kipp claims “[…] writers deployed representations of mother-child bonds as a means to naturalize various constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations[…]”(1) analyzed through “[…] through the lens of the legal, medical, educational, and socioeconomic debates[…]”(1). The importance of romantic writer’s view of maternal bond through a medical lens is important, as both the works covered in this essay tie into the romantic transitional view of disability falling between medical and social models. This essay will analyze two of these British romantic era works, both poems, and their characterization of the moon as a maternal entity to the intellectually disabled as a way for these romantic era poets to sympathize with their experience. By analyzing William Wordsworth’s The Idiot Boy and Mary Robinson’s The Maniac, through critical theory and supplemental analyses, this essay will show how the characterization of the moon as a maternal figure connects these two works thematically due to the romantic era ways used to expand sympathies for the non-normative.
The construction of the moon as a feminine figure is very in line with the romantic era “romanticization” of femininity, as well as the romantic era heightened sense of sympathy. The common theme of the moon as counterpart to the sun shares the same complimentary existence as masculinity and femininity and their respective ties to patriarchal and matriarchal sympathies. As Selene and Luna were both the feminine representations of the moon, their sun counterparts were male figures. The presence of both patriarchal and matriarchal can both be thematically “proprietary”, however that proprietorship is met culturally with different emotions. Patriarchal and paternal proprietorship are more closely tied with activities that serve to benefit, through violent and threatening means, mostly male-centric, dominating society. The interests of the patriarch in romantic writing is separate from that of the child, whereas Kipp states that “maternal subjects in terms of their relation to a child who was figured explicitly as both self and Other and represented the interests of the child as radically distinct but also absolutely inseparable from those of the mother” (2). The maternal, or matriarchal, figure, is a literary vessel for greater sympathy for romantic era writers for non-normative or disabled characters.
First, Wordsworth’s poem The Idiot Boy is narrated following the actions and thoughts of Betty Foy, the mother of Johnny or “the idiot boy”. Betty sends Johnny off to fetch a doctor for their ill neighbor, and when the night has passed a significant portion with no heed from either, she departs due to her fear of Johnny’s safety or what fate might have befallen him during his ride to the doctor. The poem takes place during the night, under the repeated mention of the moon in lines such as, “So through the moonlight lanes they go, And far into the moonlight dale” (Wordsworth, 127-28). An analysis of The Idiot Boy by G.H. Durrant draws references from Virgil’s books Aeneid and Georgics as possible influences on Wordsworth’s works to find “[…] the essential meaning of the poem. The power of a mother’s love, which creates in the Idiot Boy a sense of utter security, leads him safely and serenely through perils, whilst the mother suffers fear and anguish on his behalf. The moonlight world of death and terror is lit as with the sun—the sun does indeed shine out night for the Idiot Boy. It is the light cast on him from his mother’s eye” (5). The repetition of mentioning moonlight serves as symbolic of the concerned eyes of that proprietary matriarchal figure. Betty Foy is not explicitly the moon, nor is the moon explicitly a maternal figure, rather all combined, or intertwined, to communicate moonlight as a negativity or evil that’s transformed in Johnny’s eyes as daytime, non-fearful and even protective, through his mother’s love and faith of protection. The moonlight, therefore, still serves as the eyes of Betty, Johnny’s maternal figure, despite appearing as daytime to him. Johnny, albeit unknown to him because he does not experience the “moonlight world of death” (Durrant, 5) due to the protection of his mother’s love, shares that inseparable interest, protection from harm and death, from both him and his mother, relating back to what Kipp wrote about the mother-child bond (2).
Mary Robinson’s poem The Maniac is another work in which the moon is characterized as a maternal figure as proxy for the sympathy felt by the narrator. Author Anne DeLong, on writing about the works in which Robinson did about various “muses” or non-normative characters, notes that the common theme in these works, which include the madman in The Maniac, were caused by a “traumatic experience [that] shocks Robinson’s maniacs into madness” (85). The traumatic experiences for the “maniacs” are reflective of romanticism being a transitional period of reading disability as Bradshaw mentioned because they oscillate between the social and medical model, or both, without consistency. The Maniac doesn’t give the reader reason as to what the “traumatic event” was, rather a large part of the poem is spent by the narrator theorizing on what the potential cause is. This begins to set up a relationship between narrator and the maniac in the same way other poems by Robinson, like All Alone, where DeLong notes that the narrator is “Drawn into sympathy with the orphan and channeling her voice through his, Robinson creates a conversational poem between the poet and her muse” (85). The Maniac, in similar structure to Robinson’s other poems between narrator and non-normative character, Betty and Johnny in Wordsworth’s The Idiot Boy, and Kipp’s theory of inseparable interests through maternal structure, ends with the combination of the maniac and the narrator. DeLong writes, “The final phrase ‘ENCHANT THEE TO REPOSE’ suggests that the speaker will assume the role of healing ‘Magnetic Lady,’ working through verse to assuage the trauma of her galvanized, galvanic muse”(89). The moon serves as representative of the narrator, as the line “Thy Sov’reign Orb exulting mock”(Robinson, 23) is the narrator’s disgust towards the maniac while theorizing on his traumatic event, DeLong notes that in one of these theorizing stanzas, “Robinson casts the maniac as the oppressor of women” (88) and is condemning of him, however the sympathy towards the maniac in the final stanza also is represented as concern of the moon in the lines, “While, in her solitary tow’r, The Minstrel of the witching hour Sits half congeal’d with fear, to hear thy dismal moan” (Robinson, 34-36). The moon is symbolic of the narrator, as they both are sympathetic towards and wish to know the cause of the maniac’s sorrow, the alleviation of that sorrow being the inseparable interest of both, reflective again of Kipp’s work on mother-child bonds in romanticist writing.
William Wordsworth’s The Idiot Boy and Mary Robinson’s The Maniac are works that are connected through the thematic use of the moon as a maternal figure that comes from the romantics transitional understanding of the social and medical disability model and the use of a maternal figure as a way to convey sympathy for the non-normative, the moon being proxy for that maternal figure in both. This connection of this theme between both works is fitting, as both authors are known for their contribution to romanticism and it makes sense that they would share the same methods and ideas of the time, however, the use of the moon to characterize this relationship is what connects them more closely and transforms their connection to one another as thematically alike.
Works Cited
Bradshaw, Michael. “‘its Own Concentred Recompense’: The Impact of Critical Disability Studies on Romanticism.” Humanities, vol. 8, no. 2, 2019, pp. 103–103. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020103.
DeLong, Anne. Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse : The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity. Lexington Books, 2012. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=747060&site=ehost-live.
Durrant, G. H. “‘THE IDIOT BOY.’” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, no. 20, 1963, pp. 1–6. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41801310.
Kipp, Julie. Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic. Cambridge University Press, 2003. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=120333&site=ehost-live.
Robinson, Mary. The Maniac. 1793.
Wordsworth, William. The Idiot Boy, 1798. The British Literary Ballad Archives. Wordsworth_8_ldiot_Boy_f.pdf (literaryballadarchive.com).
Sprockets and Springes 