Chapter 6 - Mary Tighe in Life, Myth, and Literary Vicissitude

Summary

Mary Tighe’s long Spenserian allegorical romance, Psyche (1805), is one of the major poems by an Irish woman of the early nineteenth century. Shaped by the zealous Methodism of her childhood, Tighe reacted with anguish to the political violence of 1798, offering the reconciling balms of sentiment to the open wounds of sectarian conflict. In Psyche, a mother and a young woman vie for the affections of a son, displacing national struggle into a realm of emotional psychodrama. Connecting with nature, a rejected woman rediscovers the force of attachment and belonging, even as the text accommodates (via Apuleius) a good deal of sexual errancy and threats to feminine decorum. In its drama of female audacity, transgression and outcast heroism, the poem shows Miltonic ambitions, seeding a template much emulated by Tighe’s fellow poets of the nineteenth century and beyond.