A challenging piece of critical reading but one which contains some fascinating insights in to Keats's characterisation of Madeline. It will help you with your Section A Part b answer and also with your general understanding of her character.
(from) Madeline, mermaids, and Medusas in "The Eve of St. Agnes"
Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1997 by Arseneau, Mary
While recent scholarly interest in Keats has focused on gender issues in increasingly complex ways,1 Keats's ambiguous depiction of Madeline in "The Eve of St. Agnes" has not attracted the attention it deserves. Commenting that Keats's characterization is "intriguingly undecided," Susan J. Wolfson details the guises Madeline presents: "she appears variously as an innocent dreamer, an object of rapt devotion, a subject of soft ridicule, and a target for appropriative designs, opportunistic manipulation, and, some have argued, calculated betrayal" ("Keats's `Gordian Complication' of Women" 83). While this is an accurate inventory of critical positions on Madeline, this list does not take into account the full range of poetic images and mythical figures associated with Madeline in the poem. What is overlooked is the element of apprehension which counterpoints Porphyro's idealization of Madeline; for alternately saintly and enchanting, inspiring and tempting, passive and powerful, the depiction of Madeline is both an expression of Keats's often noted ambivalence towards the female figure and a model of his increasingly self-conscious treatment of the male construction of the feminine. Furthermore, a view of Madeline as a locus of female agency and as a potential threat to Porphyro necessarily informs an understanding of the dreaming state to which she attracts him, making more apparent the relation of "The Eve of St. Agnes" to the poems of Keats's maturity in which suspicions of the visionary life and of the feminine so often combine.
That Madeline is primarily represented in the poem as pure, virginal, and almost angelic cannot be argued; consequently, critics have mainly noted only Madeline's trappings of religious iconography. Indeed, her virginity is repeatedly invoked (47, 57); even the "maiden's chamber" is "chaste" (187). She is called a "Mission'd spirit" (193) and a "seraph fair" (276), and her chamber is "paradise" (244). However, this religious diction itself may indicate a certain fear of the power of women. As Karen Horney has conjectured in "The Dread of Woman," "even [the male's] glorification of women has its source . . . in his desire to conceal his dread," for by artistically objectifying woman as wonderful, beautiful, and saintly the male may assuage his fear of her (136) .5 Porphyro feels the strain of remaining autonomous in Madeline's presence: immediately after affirming Madeline's elevated spiritual status, "Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite" (277), he expresses his fear that Madeline's charmed sleep is capable of encompassing him as well: "Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake, / Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache" (278-79). Porphyro's power to summon Madeline from sleep is in fact questioned when we are told that "It seem'd he never, never could redeem / From such a stedfast spell his lady's eyes" (286-87) . Moreover, Madeline's sleep, "a midnight charm / Impossible to melt as iced stream" (283), can be seen, as Stuart M. Sperry suggests, as positively threatening (40). Critics have traditionally interpreted the climax of the poem in terms of the penetration of Porphyro's real physical presence into Madeline's dream, foregrounding Porphyro's act of self-assertion and seeing Madeline as passive, even victimized. But Keats's description specifically refers not to the dissolution of the "iced stream" of Madeline's "midnight charm" but to the melting of Porphyro, who fails to melt her icy vision and instead dissolves into it: "Into her dream he melted, . . . Solution sweet" (320). The dangers to Porphyro are twofold: one threat is the dissolution in a female presence of the male's identity and autonomy;6 the other is the hazard posed by the escape into dream and the visionary realm which Keats continues to interrogate throughout the poetry of his maturity. Certainly the penultimate stanza of "The Eve of St. Agnes" allows for the possibility that Porphyro, dissolved into Madeline's dream, is disembodied with her: their exit from the castle and from the poem is repeatedly described as incorporeal, for "In all the house was heard no human sound" (356). The lovers leave the castle, and perhaps the mortal world, by gliding out "like phantoms," a point that Keats thought worth repeating: "They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; / Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide" (361-62). Meanwhile, "the bolts full easy slide:-/ The chains lie silent on the footworn stones;/ The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans" (367-9); human agency is conspicuously absent.
It is obvious that there is an uneasy tension between dreaming and waking states in "The Eve of St. Agnes," but Madeline's dream is perhaps more powerful than is usually acknowledged. In stanza 34 Madeline appears "wide awake" but still beholds the "vision of her sleep," and the "blisses of her dream" are only "nigh expell'd" by the difference between the real Porphyro and her visionary lover (299-301) . Meanwhile, dream overpowers act as Porphyro fears "to move or speak, she look'd so dreamingly" (306). The boundaries between waking and dreaming are similarly blurred in the way Porphyro's song of stanza 33 infiltrates into Madeline's dream in stanza 35: "'Ah, Porphyro!' said she, `but even now / Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear, / Made tuneable with every sweetest vow"' (307-9). Madeline requests that the song and vision of her dream be restored, "`Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, / Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!"' (312-13), thus urging the consummation of stanza 36, figured in terms of melting, blending, entering into solution. The attractions and dangers for Porphyro of entering Madeline's dream in this way become clear in the context of Keats's letters with their repeated reference to his feeling that he is prone to being absorbed and dissolved in the presence of a beautiful woman. He describes as pleasing the effect that Jane Cox has on him: "I always find myself more at ease with such a woman . . .; I am at such times too much occupied in admiring to be awkward or on a tremble. I forget myself entirely because I live in her" (14 October 1818, Letters 1: 395). In a letter to Fanny Brawne he describes a similar loss of self which she inspires: "You absorb me in spite of myself-you alone" (25 July 1819, Letters 2: 133) . Later he writes to her, "You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.... You have ravish'd me away by a Power I cannot resist" (13 October 1819, Letters 2: 223-24). But he is not nearly so sanguine about this loss of identity at other times, writing at the end of a quite bitter letter, "it seems to me that a few more moments thought of you would uncrystallize and dissolve me-I must not give way to it" (16 August 1819, Letters 2: 142) . Keats repeatedly expresses his fear that the attraction Fanny holds for him is potentially overpowering, capable of undermining his very existence. Employing similar terms, "The Eve of St. Agnes" describes processes that threaten Porphyro's separate identity. He "melt[s]" into Madeline's dream; that is, he is disintegrated, is dissolved, is filtered in, becomes absorbed ( OED 6: 324); and the result, in chemical terminology, is a mixture in which the two substances become indistinguishable-"Solution sweet."7 Madeline, like Fanny, has the power to "absorb," "uncrystallize and dissolve" her male admirer.
The shifting between veneration and apprehension of women evident in Keats's letters is similarly intimated in the association of Madeline with both religious and demonic figures, the juxtaposition of these two polar elements being most patently obvious in the two stanzas (25-26) which describe her as she prepares for bed with Porphyro secretly looking on. The image of Madeline as angel or saint is deliberately evoked in the famous stanza in which she kneels in the aura of moonlight coloured by a stained-glass window:
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast, As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon; Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, And on her hair a glory, like a saint: She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest, Save wings, for heaven:-Porphyro grew faint: She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. (217-25)
The eroticism of Madeline's disrobing in stanza 26 (a nonsexual and private act which becomes practically a striptease under the gaze of the hidden male viewer) forms a sharp contrast to the saintly, angelic vision of her in the preceding stanza and thus encourages the reader to re-evaluate that preceding image:
. . . her vespers done, Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees; Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees: Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed Pensive awhile she dreams awake.... (226-35)
Once undressed, in the midst of her "rich attire" she stands "Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed" (231 ) . This image has received little attention from scholars, a problematic neglect since to privilege the saintly over the demonic iconography associated with the poem's heroine is to unbalance the delicately equivocal depiction of Madeline. The legendary mermaid is reputed to "allure men to their death, . . . either drowning men or devouring them" (Briggs 287) and is thus a figure associated with enthrallment. Auerbach calls the hybrid serpent-woman, from whom the mermaid derives, "the standard type of female demon" (93). To be fair, the mermaid reference in "The Eve of St. Agnes" is really a simile: Madeline is described as "like a mermaid in sea-weed" (231, my emphasis). But in retrospect, the previous stanza also presented only a simile-"like a saint"-and a tentative evaluation of her appearance-"She seem'd a splendid angel" (222, 223, my emphasis). Furthermore, Keats's first draft of this passage confirms his intention to introduce an element of danger into his depiction of Madeline, for he initially chose another alluring enchantress, the siren. According to Walter Jackson Bate, Keats, "Recalling that the association with 'sirens' has an unpleasant side," decided to replace "Half-hidden like a Syren of the Sea" with "Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed" (449). Bate's explanation is premised on an assumption that the mermaid has no "unpleasant side," that is, that it carries none of the threatening overtones that the siren does. Mermaid-lore, however, speaks of these hybrid creatures in terms of allurement-they are both beautiful and dangerous-and thus the mermaid reference does not preclude the same association with enthrallment that the word "Syren" might summon. The similarities between the siren and the mermaid are more salient than the distinctions:Jung considers them both versions of a magical feminine being, "a siren, melusina (mermaid), wood-nymph, Grace or Erlking's daughter, or a lamia or succubus, who infatuates young men and sucks the life out of them" (25). The implication of danger is present in both versions; Keats simply substitutes one enchantress for another and keeps the insistence that Madeline is "Half-hidden."8
The resonances of the mermaid image in this context, so little remarked upon, demand close attention, for the reference conjures an array of hybrid, ambiguous serpent-women such as Geraldine, Melusine, Medusa, and Keats's own Lamia. As Auerbach suggests, the mermaid's "hybrid nature, her ambiguous status as creature, typify the mysterious, broadly and evocatively demonic powers of womanhood in general" (94); and the additional detail that Madeline is "Half-hidden" suggests that there may be more to her than first meets the eye. Mermaids "submerge themselves," says Auerbach, "not to negate their power, but to conceal it" (7). For Porphyro to see Madeline "Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed" is to suggest that he now perceives her as a locus of power and a potential threat.
The "Half-hidden" vision she presents to Porphyro notably evokes another half-hidden woman, this one a creation of Spenser, whose stanzaic form Keats took as his model for "The Eve of St. Agnes"-Duessa from The Faerie Queene: `Her nether parts misshapen, monstrous, Were hid in water that I could not see, But they did seem more foul and hideous Than woman's shape man would believe to be.' (1.2.41)
It would seem, for instance, that Madeline has a Medusa-like power to turn Porphyro to stone: Madeline opens her eyes on Porphyro and "Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone" (297). Furthermore, as long as she keeps her gaze on Porphyro, he is frozen in this same posture "Fearing to move or speak" (306). This intimation of Madeline's power to turn Porphyro into stone could also make sense of a passage that has long puzzled readers of the poem, that is, the enigmatic reference to Merlin and the debt he pays to his Demon lover: "Never on such a night have lovers met, / Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt" (170-71). In "The Trouble about Merlin: The Theme of Enchantment in `The Eve of St. Agnes,"' Karen J. Harvey has observed that when Keats uses the word "demon" it "invariably refers to a female who bewitches and enthralls her male adorer, with fateful consequences for him" (87). Harvey has also convincingly argued that the lines refer to Merlin's entrapment in a stone at the hands of his lover Vivien. But while Harvey sees Porphyro potentially as an "enchanter who woos by magic means and is, in turn, entrapped by his own magic" (90), she does not draw this comparison to its logical conclusion: though Porphyro is Merlin-like, Harvey never suggests that Madeline may be the Demon lover who entraps him. However, a case can be made for seeing the allusion to Merlin and his Demon lover as a foreshadowing of the kind of enthrallment of which Madeline might be capable. This enigmatic reference seems all the more ominous because it comes directly after Angela agrees to hide Porphyro in Madeline's chamber, "That he might see her beauty unespied" ( 166) . It is also possible that Keats would have been familiar with the legend of Melusine, a French version of the Lamia myth, and that there is an echo of that myth in the depiction of Madeline. Melusine, like Merlin's Demon lover and Medusa, entraps a man in stone; and just as Porphyro hides in her chamber and spies on Madeline's transformed, mermaidlike nakedness, so too is Melusine spied upon by her husband, who hides behind the arras and sees his wife's form to be half serpent (Briggs 286).
Madeline is also repeatedly associated with magic: she herself "the conjuror plays" (124) and enacts a spell which Keats calls a "pale enchantment" (169) and "enchantments cold" (134) . This enchantment or dream, into which Porphyro melts in line 320, should be understood in the context of Keats's other poems of 1819, whose prevailing theme is "that an individual ought not to lose touch with the realities of this world" (Stillinger 87).lo During this period Keats was concerned with exploring the temptations of the world of enchantment and vision, and at this time, in a letter of February 14-May 3,1819 he describes his "system of Salvation." He calls the world "The vale of Soul-making" and asks "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?" (Letters 2: 102). Madeline's dream, which Porphyro enters, leaves the dreamer "Blissfully haven'd both from joy and pain" (240), and "Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain" (242), in short, in a realm apart from the "World of Pains and troubles" so necessary to "Soul-making." In "The Eve of St. Agnes," composed January-February 1819, the stasis implicit in both Madeline's overpowering dream and in the threat of her rendering Porphyro as stone is clearly something to be feared. Furthermore, the resonance between the "splendid angel" Madeline and the "carved angels" of stanza 4 is telling, for the description of them as "ever eager-eyed" (34) contains its own critique: the counterpart of perpetual eagerness is satisfaction forever withheld. These angels thus provide a portent of the cost of permanence as rendered in stone. A few months later, in May of the same year, Keats contemplates the Grecian urn with its "happy love! / For ever warm and still to be enjoyed," and despite the beauty and timelessness the urn embodies, he finally rejects the "Cold Pastoral" as an alternative to the mortal world of temporality, fulfilment, and suffering.
Keats would continue to poetically critique the world of dream with which Madeline is identified in "The Eve of St. Agnes." During the months following the composition of "The Eve of St. Agnes" he also developed more fully the figure of the alluring and dangerous woman in the characters La Belle Dame sans Merci and Lamia, both of whom threaten, as Madeline does, to draw the male out of the real world into a realm of magic and imagination. The threat of femininity itself becomes linked with a whole traditional set of binary opposites as Porphyro, the knight at arms, and Lycius each find action and thought threatened and undermined by the allure of the feminine and the closely associated visionary realm. Finally, "The Eve of St. Agnes" must be re-contextualised in Keats's psychological and poetic development, for it should be seen not as an ingenuous and idealised treatment of its heroine, romantic love, and the powers of the imagination, but as the harbinger of the more qualified and probing assessments of dreaming states in the later poetry, and as a precursor of the increasing prominence of the female figure and Keats's deliberate poeticising of his conflicted attraction to, sympathy with, and mistrust of her.
What a wonderfully written essay. Thankyou.
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