Witnessing suffering in Mary Robinson’s poetry of the 1790s

Thesis

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in Mary Robinson’s works, and it has become fashionable to suggest that the author casts herself as every wronged, victimised or suffering protagonist. Such readings overlook Robinson’s concerns with politics, philosophy, and other central intellectual currents of her time. This thesis aims to demonstrate that in her poetry of the 1790s, Robinson’s broader poetic project was to portray suffering in a way that resists redemption, consolation, or narrative closure. In doing so, she insists on the moral duty of witnessing suffering. The analysis combines close reading with contextual research, drawing on contemporary science, the gendered politics of the French Revolution, and literary traditions ranging from Miltonic monody to the emerging Romantic ballad. Across the corpus, Robinson deploys visual and bodily imagery and in order to portray suffering figures to probe the limits of reason, sensibility, and the mind itself in responding to human pain. The thesis is structured in five chapters, each focussing on an individual poem, ‘Sight’, (1793), Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France (1793), Sappho and Phaon (1796), ‘The Alien Boy’ (1800), and ‘The Savage of Aveyron’ (1801). Taken together, these works illustrate the variety of forms in which Robinson’s exploration of suffering appears, from representations of visual deprivation, through gendered embodiments of pain, to silenced or fragmented voices. This approach moves beyond biographical or sentimental readings, positioning Robinson’s late poetry as a site for exploring moral, philosophical, and formal questions, and opens a new direction for scholarship that attends to her engagement with suffering, voice, and the ethics of witnessing.

Authors: McKinley-Smith, H

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-5renmqkxv
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Mary Robinson; French Revolution; eighteenth-century poetry; suffering
• Subjects: English; French