Doctoral Dissertations

Kevin Eubanks

Date of Award

12-1996

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Nancy Moore Goslee

Committee Members

Edward W. Bratton, Allen Dunn, Owen Bradley

Abstract

This study analyzes domestic imagery associated with the life and death of Princess Charlotte Augusta, the only daughter of George IV. Such imagery served a disciplinary function by inculcating an apolitical female role centered in private affections. The introduction reads domestic discipline in the context of two other important power structures in early nineteenth-century Britain: namely, monarchical executions and the rule of law. The chapters are grouped in two parts. Part One outlines the popular image of the princess after her marriage, and especially after her death. Chapter one examines the image of Charlotte as ideal female, focusing especially on how writers negotiate between this image and contradictory information regarding the princess's character and political position. Chapter two analyzes the myth of Charlotte and Leopold as middle-class couple, showing how that myth functioned as legislation in which public sympathy was used to create a bond--beyond politics and class--between royalty and subjects. Chapter three examines the princess's funeral rites to elucidate how they reconcile private grief and public spectacle, and concludes by indicating the effect of the texts and rites on the political situation in England immediately following Charlotte's death. Part Two, using the analysis in Part One as an interpretive framework, focuses on four specific works occasioned by Charlotte's death: an elegy by Southey, the "Charlotte" stanzas in Byron's Childe Harold IV, an elegy by Hemans, and Shelley's Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte. Each of these elegies reveals tension between the domestic myth of Princess Charlotte and the disturbing political realities in England at the time. For Southey, the sentimental anti-politics which Charlotte represents are threatened by the bloody history of British party politics. Byron's elegy reveals his ambivalence about the role of women and about aristocracy and reform. In Hemans's elegy, questions about Charlotte, gender, and politics mirror the poet's own struggles as an independent female author. Shelley's address calls into question the moral efficacy of private sentiment. Both working class rebellions and his failed marriage to Harriet reveal the limitations of sympathy as a basis for moral decisions.

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