9 - The Media Ecology of Romantic Consciousness: Knowledge in Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head

Summary

Charlotte Smith's late masterpiece, Beachy Head, published posthumously one year after the author's death, begins in a manner that is still widely considered to be typically Romantic:

On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime!

That o’er the channel reared, half way at sea

The mariner at early morning hails,

I would recline; while Fancy should go forth,

And represent the strange and awful hour

Of vast concussion … (1–6)

Nature, the sublime, subjectivity, imagination – these topics seem to pave the way for a poem based on a thoroughly dualistic concept of the human. According to this dualistic concept, consciousness is interior, based on the subjective mind which, in turn, is clearly opposed to the material world. Smith's speaker is situated in a recognizable setting within nature, reclining on top of Beachy Head, the cliffs in East Sussex looking down on the English Channel. The rich history of the spot, as well as its proximity to France, triggers the complex meditations that characterize the bulk of the poem. In this sense it is, in Smith's own words, a ‘local poem’ (Smith, Collected Letters 705) or, as Jacqueline Labbe states, a ‘contemplative blank-verse poem’ that ‘participates in the Romantic revival of the prospect poem’ (Labbe 142–3).

The first part covers the time span of an entire day, from early morning to night. In other traditional Romantic poems, like Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’ or Coleridge's ‘Frost at Midnight,’ such an opening sequence would then – according to M. H. Abrams's influential description of the ‘greater Romantic lyric’ – turn into an extended inward meditation. In Beachy Head, however, these expectations are thwarted as the poem takes an entirely different course:

Contemplation here,

High on her throne of rock, aloof may sit,

And bid recording Memory unfold

Her scroll voluminous … (117–20)

The mediation of the stream of consciousness, to apply the term for the most famous modernist narrative technique, is not rendered invisible, mimicking the ongoing associations of ideas; rather, it is made discernible through Smith's fragmentation of the mind. Readings of Smith's poem tend to characterize this fragmented narration either as caused by different speakers1 or as different forms of a gendered self-fashioning persona. Yet, this passage suggests that Smith's poem presents the speaker's consciousness as different faculties of the mind, which appear as personifications, in these lines as Contemplation and Memory.