Two Selves

SOME OF THE MOST AMBITIOUS POEMS in Meynell's first volume of poetry, Preludes (1875),– published under her unmarried name, A. C. Thompson– concern an “identity” or “self” (generally interchangeable words in the discussions of the mind) that arises in opposition to a remembered past.⁶

Three in particular–“The Poet to His Childhood,” “A Letter to a Girl from Her Own Old Age,” and “A Study”–focus wholly or in part on the relation of an adult being to her childhood. They betray the uncertainties of a young Victorian woman who valued social and personal autonomy–her idea of self–but wanted to reconcile her present and future with her past. Because each poem explores a mature mind unbeholden to the past for its identity yet tied, all the while, to a material record of the self, all three contribute to contemporary discussions of children and childhood as they question the idea of a persistent identity and begin to redefine it through physiological memory.

I open my discussion of the poems with a look at a significant coda to the publication of Preludes. Some time around 1892, Meynell thought of reissuing its contents in a new collection but wanted first to revise some of the poems. In a letter, the poet Francis Thompson tries to dissuade her:

As the passage reveals, since writing Preludes Meynell had become a different sort of poet, and Thompson expresses this difference as an opposition between the two selves of youth and age. At twenty-eight, she had hardly been a girl when her volume had appeared; but momentous events had occurred since: she had married, had children, and become a journalist. Her impulse to tamper with the self recorded in Preludes was, I propose, an attempt to establish what John Locke called a “forensick” self, one arising from social relations and standards and based on responsibility (ii.27.26 [346]). Frances Ferguson reads this forensic self as the product of “romantic memory,” which by evaluating past actions through succeeding events demonstrates individual accountability through time (523). In this instance Preludes was the past action, the sign of the youthful self that Meynell disowned and wanted to align with her present aesthetic consciousness.

Thompson's stand against tampering with the poems in order to elide a past identity reflected an acceptance of what his contemporary Lewes, in Problems of Life and Mind (1879), called a “variously manifesting Self” both within an act and between acts (1: 106). The assumption of the self as a multiple manifestation, both simultaneously and over time, was a late-Victorian development of a nagging argument about the stability of the personality. For Hume, memory, had been “the source of personal identity” (261); but it was also a fictitious bond, an associative process governed by the principle of causation and applied to “successive perceptions” of objects, in this case ourselves (253). Disguising succession as causation allows us to extend “the identity of our persons beyond our memory” and to find or “discover” an identity through continuity between actions (Hume 262). In this light, Meynell's desire to change the past underscores the possible gap between conscious memory of the past and recognition of persistent identity from another, unconscious source. And her final decision (at Thompson's urging) to leave the poems alone signals an intellectual struggle to discover the limits of identity and to come to terms with “variously manifesting selves” over time.

Signs of this struggle appear much earlier, in the poems themselves. The problems raised by Locke and Hume in their descriptions of memory and identity are evident in Meynell's dramatic poem of remembering, “The Poet to His Childhood.” Like an earlier poem, Alfred Lord Tennyson's “The Two Voices” (1842), it attempts to represent psychological reality through two aspects of the same being.⁷

Only here, childhood, though “lost” (3) and existing only “[i]n…thought” (1), is not only an interiorized past, a part of the adult mind, but a separate physical entity, located in a landscape of the past. This former self, we learn, stood before two paths, one leading to a hill, the other to a meadow. The first is the way of the ambitious “singing soul for music's sake” (6). Its aim is the sun, though the way may be, the child acknowledges, through rain “[u]nconsoled by sympathy” (8). This is the path taken, nonetheless; and the grown poet speaks of its consequences from the height of achievement. The choice has left him without family or community, resigned to a writer's life of “little mournful lonelinesses” (27) with a reduced capacity for fellowship. For if “e'er you should come down to the village or the town,” the grown poet tells his childhood, “You will stand upon the thresholds with a face of dumb desire,/Nor be known by any fire” (29, 30–31). A decision of childhood has shaped, then, both the circumstances and internal development of the adult, and the poem juxtaposes the confident voice of childhood with the recriminatory remarks of the adult. Here the poet addresses this past (as “you”): In retrospect, the enviable potential of childhood, its unlimited determinacy in Schiller's eyes, now looks merely like a “wayward child's ideal at some ten years old” (18). From a position of knowledge, the adult poet in the poem wonders and chafes, not at the unlimited determinacy of childhood, but at its determinative power and the irony that an unformed being, without memory or wisdom, should control its own formation. The poet has both memory and wisdom; for that reason he can speak to “childhood,” while “childhood” speaks, appropriately, only to itself. Its words are in quotation marks, dissociated from the controlling identity of the poem. But the poet's memories have not been abundant recompense for lost potential. “It is memory that shrinks” (33), he declares later. Through memory, in other words, the forensic self perceives his own “shrinking” possibilities; and through memory he apprehends a separation of consciousness. He is condemned to obey a self with whom he no longer feels much connection, and who seems, from the grown poet's diminished life, an ignorant and “small voice” of vast potential and no experience, against whom he now must define himself.

Casting the child as an unformed being of vast potential, the poet's memory combines contradictory views of childhood, the Romantic and the scientific, as it forges a “forensick” self; but in doing so it undercuts any persistent or unitary identity. At the same time, however, memory inescapably binds the adult to his past. The adhesive may merely be mental, that disguise of association Hume described, and the poet may resemble his childhood no more than a man resembles the infant he once was or a renovated ship resembles its once-ruined hulk. If so, according to Hume, it is only the causative principle structuring successive thoughts that unites them. Or the binding force might be, as Hume hinted, a physiological or unconscious source of other selves “beyond our memory” (262). Locke, who also suspected that unitary identity depended on consciousness and memory, imagined both dispersed beyond the mind through the fleeting corporeal spirits. (This is his “distributed” model of memory [see Locke {II.27.12}, 337].) The accounts of both Hume and Locke gesture, then, toward some sort of non-mentalistic memory.⁸

In doing so, they help establish the grounds of a materialist argument for a non-unitary, corporeal identity–an argument that, though forced underground until the 1840s, dogged subsequent conceptions of a continuous and unitary self.⁹

Whereas early theories of identity do not explain the paradox of consciousness in which the poet feels dissociation but senses, all the while, some sort of continuous identity, later considerations of inaccessible neurophysiological processes illuminate the predicament of Meynell's poet recoiling from but inextricably bound to, his childhood. Starting from certain assumptions of the Scottish common-sense school of associationism (about the self-evident existence of thoughts and material objects), mid-nineteenth-century mental science began to confront the existence of sensations, perceptions, and memories of beings in various sub-rational states and to search for the ways in which the human body– even when drunk, dreaming, or asleep–registered stimuli.¹⁰

By the time Preludes debuted in 1875, there existed a British psycho-physiology that had taken up long-suppressed materialist challenges to the idea of a persistent identity by locating a memory beyond consciousness in the body's motor-sensory mechanisms. As Edward S. Reed has argued, the ideas of the new psycho-physiology, represented by Maudsley, Lewes, Thomas Laycock, and Alexander Bain, among others, actually reconfigured the traditional dualism between mind (or soul) and body as a split between a conscious custodian of identity and an unconscious mind coursed by neuro-physiological forces.¹¹ The shift to this new dualism is apparent in Sir William Hamilton's influential Lectures on Metaphysics (1859). The volume bridged the associationist theories that had governed psychology since the seventeenth century and emergent ideas of a physiological unconscious. While reaffirming both retentive and reproductive (i.e., active) operations of memory that philosophers since Aristotle had accepted, Hamilton focused on the latter, whose principal faculty is recollection or reminiscence, to develop a theory of “obscure or latent modifications” in mental energy through repetition (I: 416). Because acts of “reproductive” memory imply a previous activity, this sort of memory is essentially a modified repetition of an experience which occurred first in the body and nervous system. It belongs to the systemic operation of the organism and reproduces its movements and perceptions in less energetic forms.

Some of Hamilton's contemporaries were more specific about the nature of this repetition. In The Senses and the Intellect (1855), which represents a transition from an older associationism to a new neurophysiology, Bain described memory as a “reoccupation of the sentient circles,” which could not match perception in the degree of emotion, motor activity, and sensory involvement (344).¹²

Several decades later, in the second volume of Problems of Life and Mind, Lewes (along with George Eliot, Sully, and Michael Faster, who finished the book from his notes after he died in 1878) argued that recollection reprocessed residua, or “modifications impressed by past experiences” formed as perceptions, which in turn were “reinstatements” of sensory impressions (2: 107, 113). The residua, Lewes's editors write, come from the sensorium, our “plexus of sensibilities.” As reinstatements of the second order, memories are not just a fainter form of re-excitation, as Bain had argued; they involve a “substitution of a verbal process for the processes of special sense” (2: 424). Lewes's distinction furthered Hamilton's and Bain's earlier theories of recollection or reminiscence as a modified repetition of a sensory stimulus.

Bain's concept of memory as diminishment and the refinement of Lewes et al. of memory as verbal substitution illuminate the acquiescent and bitter determinism of the double monologue in “The Poet to His Childhood.” With his superior knowledge and the developed powers of language, the adult poet both judges and exonerates the child: “For you knew not, young rash speaker, all you spoke, and now will I,/With the life, and all the loneliness revealed that you saw fit,/Sing the Amen, knowing it” (42–44). This “Amen” represents the poet's “sung” affirmation of the life the child launched; it becomes the verbal repetition of sensory acts. Because the adult's repetitions are only verbal residua –far from the sensory and perceptual stimuli that sent “childhood” up the mountain paths in search of the experience of solitude, “vague reverie” (35) and the “[w]ider wilderness” (27)–the grown poet identifies himself as the residuum of the child. Because he can now know childhood through subsequent actions, the poet speaking to his childhood is both beholden to the past and in impotent recoil from it. To put this point in a combination of Lockean and materialist terms, if the poet's “forensic[k]” memory sees his childhood figuratively as a different being, it also confirms, through its operation based in the sensorium, that this childhood is self-evidently his (own). Meynell's conventional use of two voices and two differently placed bodies to represent the memory of childhood thus pairs a tradition of skepticism about the unitary self with a representation of corporeal continuity from Victorian psycho-physiology.

Haptics: “A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age”

VICTORIANS WORKING in the materialist tradition of mental science treated memory as part of a systemic nervous action involving extremities of the body. A general shift in the perceived center of identity from brain to the sensorium, the nerve centers in the spinal chord, is reflected by Hamilton's declaration that no “other mental power betrays a greater dependence on corporeal conditions than memory,” by Bain's description of mnemonic “iteration” as “complex trains” of physical movement such as sweeps of the head and movements of the hand with concomitant associations of ideas and emotion, and by Lewes's declaration that “Gall was much nearer the truth [than were proponents of a localized function] when he assigned to each faculty its own Memory” (Hamilton 1: 419; Bain 337; Lewes et al., Problems 2: 120). To physiological psychologists such as Lewes, the sensorium was the “seat of Sensibility” (Physiology 2: 23). “The idea of a cerebral closet is quite incompatible with the real manner of the working nerve,” Bain remarked (343).¹³

Maudsley, in Body and Will (1883), one of the most rebarbative of the psycho-physiological rebuttals of mind-based psychologies, defined memory as a reproductive mechanism based in the sensorium: As these statements indicate, the physiological explanation of memory obviously involved an unconscious. Theories of its presence and operation, though widely accepted and circulated by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, had enough detractors for Maudsley to proclaim its existence in Body and Will as if throwing down the gauntlet to a room of opponents: “Those who…treat the notion of the unconscious mind as a gross absurdity, should soberly explain where, during a particular conscious state, all the rest of the mind is” (77). Yet some theory of a physiological unconscious was a natural development of associationism. For in general, as Reed has observed, “associationist accounts of how sensations become perceptions all require that many of our sensations go unnoticed” (75). As Carpenter claimed in his Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), the rules of association showed that “any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated, tends to perpetuate itself” (344). Hence Victorians studying reproductive and retentive faculties of memory, both of which had been explained as associative operations, were led to consider the role of the unconscious in the forms of repetition and habit.

One important precursor of the idea of an “unconscious” nerve function was the notion of a “muscular sense” advanced during the first two decades of the century.¹⁴

According to this theory, sensory receptors in our muscles convey “resistance” and “extension” and in the process tell us where our bodies are. We usually have no conscious awareness of them, however; they work without external stimuli, Lewes emphasized in The Physiology of Common Life (1859 [2: 279; see Reed 71]). Eliot, who certainly knew of this prevalent theory from her association with Lewes, used it to explain the unconscious desires of characters in Middlemarch (1871–72). Bulstrode's “indirect misdeeds” resembled, the narrator explains, “the subtle muscular movements which are not taken account of in the consciousness, though they bring about the end that we…desire” (686–87). Raffles may break his vow of silence regarding Bulstrode's past because an unconscious, perverse wish to do so will “relax” his muscles, we learn, at the very moment in which he consciously decides against speaking (708). Because the muscular sense can convey desires that contradict conscious intentions, it adds another strain to identity, one which co-exists with, or even supersedes, consciousness.

This muscular sense of self–more tactile than visual; physical rather than cerebral; unconscious, in the sense that it is habitually felt rather than deliberately represented–was, moreover, a development of Berkeley's doctrine (in the Essay on Vision of 1709) that “touch teaches vision” (qtd. in Reed 63). Touch, arguably, was fundamental to the conception of the self because it conveyed the sense of “extension”–the space occupied by the body. But touch was also internal–the sensory basis of a physiological unconscious. Hamilton, while asserting the primacy of sight in a conception of the ego, acknowledges, “The external object is in contact with the organ, and thus, in a certain signification, all the senses are only modifications of Touch” (1: 397). “Every impression in the senses can…be resolved finally into an impression of contact or touch; so that Touch is the fundamental sense, and all the organs of the senses are but very delicate instruments of touch,” Laycock affirms (2: 10). Maudsley contends, following contemporary thinking published in the Revue philosophique, that human beings owe their conception of “non-ego” or the unconscious to “touch and its motor-adaptations primarily, to sight and its motor adaptations secondarily, but to motor adaptations in all cases” (48).¹⁵

It is touch–not, as Hume thought, a conceptual memory– that verifies the survival of the body, even in an altered form; and it is the body that verifies an “I,” one which is tangibly present, neither split like the spectral self nor metaphysical like the idea of mind, spirit, or soul, that somehow guides the body from an indeterminate place. Because the theory of the muscular sense supposed an unconscious centered in the body through which memory and desire operated, remembering became a particular mechanism of the neuro-muscular system, and identity became linked with this physiological process, rather than simply with conscious fictions of association.

In the context of these discussions, Meynell's “A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age,” probably the best known poem from Preludes, becomes part of an ongoing materialist argument for identity based in the sensorium. In “A Letter,” the ground of the link between the girl and her aged self, as it emerges, rests not on a metaphysical conception, but in the non-cerebral faculty of touch. The text of the poem is a letter a young girl writes to herself to be read when she is old, ostensibly in order to forge a connection between a “time-worn woman” (2) and the “bright life” of youth (46). On the surface, the contents of this time-capsule convey the estrangement from the myopic child so evident in “The Poet to His Childhood.” For the letter contains no concrete, personal recollections, no raw information about its author's present youth. Instead, it refers mainly in frightened and vague phrases, to the future. Aging, the girl imagines, will be a “mute and strange declining” (45), a “fade to death” (21), a journey into a “grey and silent world” (17) where “the young flowers of the mountain grow not” (24) from the “lost country” of youth (30). The girl who speaks through her letter to her future, adult self and controls the perspective of the poem cannot predict, she admits, the precise direction of early influence on her own old age: “What part of this wild heart of mine I know not/Will follow with thee where the great winds blow not” (22–23). Still, “This wind from thy lost country flits beside thee;/Telling thee: all thy memories moved the maiden” (30–31). The last line of this passage contains an impossibly proleptic statement, but one that reveals the physiological basis of remembering. When these memories “moved,” inspired, or motivated the girl, they were not memories at all, but sensations and perceptions, the forerunners of the “latent modifications” of memory. The seeming confusion of faculties signals a momentary suspension of time and intimates the reproductive mechanism of memory as contemporary writers described it: now in the weaker physiological form of utterance, memories are modified repetitions of the sensations and perceptions of girlhood.

Through physiology, the poem attempts to resolve the problem of conscious dissociation from the past self that dominates “The Poet to His Childhood.” There, the adult mind has so altered that the “poet” addresses his past as an exteriorized, other self. He finds a persistent identity only in the unassailable conviction that his body and the child's are indeed the same. Arguably, this belief, though marred by disaffection, is no different from the “fiction” of identity that Hume believed the mind used to create a unitary self. In “A Letter,” the writer foresees the same splitting of the self that separates the grown poet from his past in the first poem; the sub-vocalized utterance of the old woman reading re-iterates the words written by the hand of her younger self. But here, writing and reading create a physiological connection between past perceptions and present memories. For as evidence of the act of writing, the letter links the subject's two identities through touch:

The words written by the girl, and the paper handled, will be the same read and held by the old woman. The girl remembers or, more accurately, predicates remembering, as a motor-sensory relation with objects. She sustains a sense of self in the breach between youth and old age through an artifact that both girl and woman have touched. The last stanza and the closing lines of the letter convey a tension between touch and sight as means of psycho-physiological orientation. Here touch, rather than teaching vision, surmounts vision's limitations: “The one” to whose ministrations the girl is consigning the old woman is, of course, herself. Her “filial” fingers again caress the hair of the old woman. This touch occurs as the writer “guesses,” the “faded features” (55) of her aged self; it happens “now” (55), that is, in the present. This means, obviously, that in line 55 time has collapsed: the girl touches hair “now” that she imagines will one day be grey and touched again by “thin fingers” (3). The effect is an uncanny moment in which the body imagined registers an alteration (the grey hair, the thin fingers, the faded features) while the body touched assures continuity. Whereas the visual contrast between youth and old age threatens to shock, the letter as tactile object promises to comfort with its enduring presence.

Because the letter as a document of reminiscence offers old age no restorative vision of childhood, only shopworn images and vague fears, its value and interest do not lie in the power of the words to recover a picture of the past, but in its survival as an object. With nothing to convey except a mute testimony of having been there, it is a material record of memory. Its ability to maintain a sense of persistent identity for the old woman rests in a tactile orientation and communication that Meynell's generation would call “haptics.” The word, along with its derivative, “haptical,” was not commonly used until the first years of the twentieth century, but its appearance in John S. Billings's The National Medical Dictionary of 1890 (“Pertaining to touch, tactile” [1: 620]) was a victory for touch in the contest with sight for primacy as the indicator of “extension.” When used, it referred to a greater dependence on touch than sight as a medium of psychological orientation. A haptical document, the letter provides a point of contact for the girl and the old woman, a contact the girl rehearses by touching her face and body as she writes. Through haptical communication, the girl ensures continuity between herself and a being she can barely imagine (and then only with shock). But touch will link the young and old selves: handling the letter, reading it, crying over it, caressing hair that one day will look very different will maintain a corporeal identity amidst the multiple selves of consciousness.

The psychological materialism of “A Letter” is more advanced and affirmative than in “The Poet to His Childhood,” most likely because the concerns of the latter were traditionally masculine and mentalistic, centered on vocation and intellectual growth. As opposed to the autonomous male speaker of “The Poet,” the girl of “A Letter” construes the self largely in physical terms, and she betrays the particularly invasive “eye” of the world in the construction of a woman's identity. This was an issue the older Meynell would face again in her essay, “Children in Midwinter.” By the time it appeared in The Children (1897), the prospect of a spectral self who had metamorphosed beyond attentive recognition had become a reality, and the middle-aged writer regarded the physical perfection of childhood with envy and incomprehension. Lyrical poetry compares a woman to a flower because “she could not endure to be compared with a child…. Why, it is defeat enough for a woman to have her face, however well-favoured, close to a child's, even if there is no one by who should be rash enough to approach them still nearer by comparison” (28).¹⁶

Of course Meynell was hardly the only Victorian female poet to confront the terrors of aging and physical change: Mary E. Coleridge treats a macabre moment of recognition in “The Other Side of a Mirror” (1896), and Augusta Webster devotes an entire monologue (“Faded” [1893]) to the mirror-image. The girl of “A Letter,” is, to some readers, more hopeful than the female speakers in either of these poems, perhaps because both she and her creator were young. Although the poem, Angela Leighton writes in her short discussion of it, shows woman “a creature of shallow social images” and relies on the primacy of sight, the “mirror of the external view,” to register the shock of aging, it finally “asks for the coherence of a life in which beginning and end are in touch with each other” (190, 189).¹⁷ The haptics of “A Letter” foresees but circumvents a visual confrontation. It offers tactile, in the place of spectral, continuity of selves and thereby avoids the severe aesthetic standards composing the social gaze which, as all these texts show, women themselves had internalized.¹⁸ In “A Letter,” identity lies in the sentient body; it is an internal sense rather than a spectral image. If the visual self is objectified and regulated, the haptical self is autonomous, something a woman can possess beyond the control of social idealization and governance.

Childhood and Interiority: “A Study”

A PSYCHO-PHYSIOLOGY based in the muscular sense and the tactile produced a version of the self reminiscent of the child's primal identity. According to Sully, one of the editors of Lewes's posthumous Problems of Life and Mind and the author of Studies of Childhood (1910), the child's earliest sense of self lies in the trunk of the body. The source of hunger and thirst, as well as of the first minor discomforts, the trunk makes itself known to children as “the most important and vital part of themselves” (Studies 109–12). Children's first drawings, Sully relates, show the torso only. Arms and legs come later, and though stick-like (and resembling, he notes, the pictures made by “savages”), they animate the form “with an air of joyous expression, as if to say, through their extension, ‘Here I am!’” (Children's Ways 181). (His picture of the stick body with outstretched arms demarcating the locus of its existence could serve as a paradigm for the forensic self of “The Poet to His Childhood” proclaiming, in effect, from atop the mountain, “Here I am! You put me here!”) The “I,” represented in drawings, presumably, by the head, is conceived as a separate, spectral image, and is added by the child many weeks later. Undertaken in the intellectual enlightenment of evolutionary theory, Studies of Childhood and its abridged version, Children's Ways, enriched the Romantic idea of the child as a creature of physical vigor and keen sensory response; and they supported the mentalistic idea of the adult as an ameliorated and “higher” self, whose identity lay in the mind.

Sources Sully cites for their acute observations of children include works by Ruskin, Goethe, and “Maynell” [sic] (Children's Ways 75). Although he enlists her name to support an account of human development in which identity from a tactile or muscular sense located in the torso develops into a mind-based self, her own leanings are ambiguous. Certainly as a journalist she was aware of current trends and disagreements in mental science. In marrying Wilfrid Meynell, she would ally herself–though only in name, perhaps–with the line of Tukes, who included Samuel, the founder of the York Retreat. Daniel H. Tuke, his grandson and Wilfrid Meynell's cousin, was a specialist in nervous diseases and the author of several works on mental science, including Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind Upon the Body in Health and Disease… (1872). The extent of Alice Meynell's association with this branch of the family or familiarity with his works is not documented; but signs of her direct engagement with psychology are evident in her essays of the 1890s, and Sully's free use of her name suggests that by writing on children she engaged with ongoing discussions about the seat of individual identity.

Although the deadlines and limitations of space under which Meynell always wrote kept her from elaborating on any intellectual issue, her casual references to the contested ideas of materialist psychology indicate either a glancing awareness of, or a thorough familiarity with, them. For example, in an essay also written during the 1890s, Meynell criticized Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose poetry and humorous stories she admired, for opposing “the secrets of the inherited body and soul” through “burlesque physiology” (“Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes” 66). When Holmes had addressed the theory directly, in a lecture of 1870, “Mechanism in Thought and Morals,” he had opposed only the idea of inheriting acquired characteristics. Otherwise, he had followed many of the current materialists' positions regarding the role of the “nervous influence” in mental processes. At one point in the lecture, he calls memory the “material record” of the brain (Mechanism 77).¹⁹

Again, in a brief piece entitled “Habits and Consciousness” (1896), Meynell considers the “perpetual presence of mind” of Tolstoy's characters: in a continuous state of apperception, they regard themselves thinking, seeing, and feeling; there is no “unconsciousness” in them (99, 98). Like all of her observations, this is offered as no more than an aperçu. Yet, arguably, she noticed the absence precisely because it appeared to contradict the then general acceptance of the unconscious.

In fact, Meynell was accused of circulating physiological theories of the self by none other than Francis Thompson. When urging her not to tamper with her early poems, he had conveyed belief in the lost self of youth, but his was apparently a metaphysical notion, for he strongly protested her suggestion of a physiological unconscious in “Eyes,” a typically brief and self-consciously aphoristic column for the Pall Mall Gazette of 1895. In it, she displays an awareness of involuntary physiological sensation and perception as she describes the “secrets” of the eyelid: “All along its edges are the little muscles, living, that speak not only the obvious and emphatic things, but what reluctances, what perceptions, what ambiguities, what half-apprehensions, what doubts, what interceptions!” (36). To Thompson, the description was fraught with the jargon of psycho-physiology. “‘She is to blame for sophisticating her poet's discernment of phenomena by a priori deductions from the basis of material science,’” he charges. “‘When a poet begins to talk like that he is falsifying the precious gift of the natural eye which he has in common with the child’” (qtd. in Badeni 132). In Thompson's very Romantic idea of the child's mind as a tabula rasa (which was specifically refuted by Preyer and other psychologists focused on heredity and acquired characteristics), Meynell's observations were unnatural because they were grounded in scientific theory rather than innocent vision.²⁰

Thompson's obsession with Meynell, which included a frenetic correspondence with and about her, as well as habitual and protracted appearances in her drawing room, virtually guaranteed her awareness of this criticism; it is one of the strongest indications of her conscious association with the principles of materialism.

Arguably, Meynell's strong and evident religious beliefs should have corrected any inclination for materialism in her writing. To some readers, her Catholicism might constitute a repudiation of any mental science that does away with the soul. Yet psycho-physiology often underwrote a conventionally metaphysical notion of the self. Remembering, perhaps, decades of suppression, many Victorian materialists carefully aligned their ideas with prevailing theological beliefs. Laycock's Mind and Brain (1860) was an especially apt composite of teleological evolution, psycho-physiology, and older theological arguments. If, as Laycock states, “Man's fundamental cognition that he is One, correlates the fundamental teleiotic idea of creation and organisation,” then psycho-physiology could support an ontological idea of physical forces as manifold manifestations of God. In fact, it is misleading to speak too categorically of opposing camps in mental science (Laycock 2: 16; see Reed 3). Both Tuke, who was an M.D., and Holmes, who was not, advocated mind-based psychologies but accepted some materialist ideas of the unconscious: both, for instance, quote or name Carpenter and Laycock with approval on “muscular movement” excited through the spinal chord (see Tuke 42–43; Holmes, 36–37). Although Meynell never discusses Holmes's lecture or Tuke's practices, she betrays an interest in some of the same ideas in essays such as “Eyelids” and “Habits and Consciousness.” These various comments signal her exposure to theories concerning some physiological form of habit, of the muscular sense, and of evolution in theorizing childhood. And certainly her definitions of childhood as states of transitoriness and of antiquity likewise reflect “recapitulatory child psychology,” which had become allied with teleological theories of evolution (see Steedman 84–86).

Meynell's early assimilation of materialist ideas and religious doctrine is evident in the last poem of Preludes, a long dramatic monologue called “A Study: In Three Monologues, with Interruptions.” Working with the still-popular motif of the fallen woman, the poet again confirms the dissociative effect of conscious memory and uses childhood as a stage of development against which to distinguish an adult's meliorative self. “A Study” is also a poem about a woman's new-found faith (Meynell had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1868). In it the speaker moves beyond denials of youthful bliss and loss to figure a new inner life as a racial and cultural childhood preserved in the body. This daring poem, which marks one of the important paths psycho-physiology would take, uses childhood as a pre-Freudian (that is, unrepressed) unconscious, one which the speaker invests with residual Romantic values.

In the poem, the speaker lives in isolation from all of society, including her young son and his moralistic guardian (who, she implies, is the boy's father [I.47–50]). She shows no fondness for her own youthful innocence and betrays downright hostility toward her own child. Through these figures, Meynell continues to slight the fabled virtues of children and childhood in favor of mature judgment. The religious content of the poem is most explicit in Part III, in which the woman contemplates her “[n]ew life of grace” (III.66) and generates several images of herself as a child or as a possessor of childhood (as when she prays to the saints, “Protect this perilous childhood in my heart!” [III.46]). The use of the innocent child to represent the redeemed soul, a conventional New Testament image, here has additional dramatic impact: it aggravates her antipathy toward her past, that is, her remembered childhood. For in an earlier passage, the fallen woman casts off, not just her recent transgression, but the supposedly edenic time before it:

As a girl, she goes on to clarify, she was guilty of “insincerity of thoughts” which she projected onto a “pure and simple Nature” (II.37–38), smiling the smile “[o]f any Greek composing sunny gods” (II.40–41). She committed, in other words, the pathetic fallacy, which she introduces here as though it were a crime and as if the Greeks were not, as Ruskin believed (in the third volume of Modern Painters [1856]), guileless. The romantic projections of her youth were signs of weakness and arrogance; with maturity, she has come to separate her consciousness from the physical properties and movements of the external world. Only now does she understand and appreciate the autonomy of nature. In this way, Meynell again debunks the theory of childhood established in Wordsworth's “Ode” as a state close to perfection.

The “one true white child-time,” her character asserts, begins not at the start of life, but amidst its “ruins” (II.42–43), at spiritual conversion. In Part II, she imagines its conception as a sloughing and a pregnancy:

The image of the embryo offsets the image of the mature ilex or holly, whose botanical and medicinal significance complicates the simple idea of redemption with suggestions of physiological movement. In the more conventional metaphor, the ilex, which figures the contrite soul, sheds its leaves to prepare for new growth. (According to Billings's Medical Dictionary of 1890, the plant–specifically its berries–has a considerably less ethereal value, as an emetic and cathartic; this usage similarly balances the image of the embryo [1: 682].) Through the analogy of the ilex, the adult moving “towards” death loses or purges the “things and thoughts” of her past, and as tabula rasa, becomes a child. Here, the fetus is, obviously, the soul in the conventionally spiritual sense; but the soul is realized as a physiological process in the body. Just as psychical life is the result of the neuro-muscular system, the soul, as Lewes asserts and as Meynell suggests here, is a product of the living organism (Problems 1: 64–65, 75). Whereas many mind-based psychologies “saw the soul being driven from cover to cover…while progressively being robbed of its functions by material physiological mechanisms,” Meynell's poem uses physiology to represent the soul in a general, organic theory of life and thereby reconciles her faith with a fundamental aspect of materialist science (Richards 362).

The religious content of “A Study” does not contradict the strain of materialism in Meynell's early poetry, then, but confirms the break in conscious self from childhood to adulthood that skeptics of persistent identity had confronted. Simultaneously, the poem's account of redemption through grace, while reclaiming the Romantic idea of childhood as a state of innocence and unlimited determinacy, turns it into a privileged interiority of the adult. In these ways, the passages from the poem clarify the difference between an empirical childhood–one's own past–which she regrets, and a qualitative one, which can abide as a spiritual and fundamentally physiological property of an adult human being. “A Study” thus turns the fear of “A Poet to His Childhood”–that one's body is, through all is transmutations, inescapable–into the comfort of a continuous, though not fixed, identity that resides in the body's sensorium.

If the doctrine of redemption through grace in “A Study” easily accommodates the Romantic possibility of a mature self–wise and experienced, but also fresh, its senses alive, its inner potential indeterminate–the belief also confirms that, as Nikolas Rose remarks, selfhood has historically been more of an aim than a given (Inventing 4; see also 1–21). In England, according to John Sutton, certain conceptions of the self helped “justify the location of basic political and economic rights and responsibilities in the individual,” while others may have developed from “the imposition of order and unity in religious contexts” (Sutton 162). The speakers of “A Poet to His Childhood” and “A Study” desire autonomy, which they understand as a break from the past and a disruption of a persistent self, and which they express through disaffection, even animosity, toward childhood and children. In the history of women's quest for selfhood, this antipathy is unusual. Ever since the publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848, an imposing body of feminist and social theory has treated the family as an “ideological mechanism for reproducing a docile labor force” of women and children, both allied as dependents of patriarchial structures (Rose, Governing 124; Marx and Engels 12, 28–29). Meynell's poems, however, disclose tensions between women and children that sentimental views of the family–as a unit created and sustained by emotional attachment–have disguised. In “The Poet to His Childhood” and “A Letter,” the child is an instance of prosopopoeia, a personification of the subject's past. In “A Study” the figure becomes incarnate; a child appears who is the woman's own son. A version of the undeveloped child outgrown in “The Poet to His Childhood,” this boy mouths the censure of the world for his mother's violation of conventional values. When told by his guardian, “we hope that you repent,/At least, your son and I,” the woman does little more than repeat her son's reported words, “God bless my son,/My little son hopes I repent at least” (II.72–75). Her addition, “little”–an endearment when she used it to describe her own incipient life of grace gestating within (“A little innocent life grows…”)–is no longer a term bestowed, but one wielded to emphasize her own physical power. With this word the woman asserts her own immunity from his censure by virtue of her age. The word literally “belittles” her son in response to his arrogance, and it reminds us of his status as a minor. Several lines later the woman herself ventures an outright judgment; “Save me,” she declares, “from the sick eyes of my one child” (II.91), a response that calls into question the rights of childhood. “God bless my son” is not the repentance for which the son hopes, but a demonstration of her own right to forgive.

In this extraordinary clash between mother and child, the struggle for identity, which elsewhere has surfaced in the mental distance of adults from figures of childhood, becomes a contest between an adult woman and a male minor for the social right to selfhood. The notion of the child and mother as opponents within some legal, economic, or cultural ideal of selfhood was, in fact, a real, if minor, complaint in writing on family law. According to John Stuart Mill, for instance, the marriage contract pitted a woman against her children by upholding their interests and interfering with the parents' desire to separate. Although marriage ensured an “almost despotic power of husbands over wives,” children were the “real obstacle to the fulfillment by the state of its duties” (128) to ensure women's freedom. As Mill concedes, a “relation between two contracting parties [that ]…has placed third parties [i.e., children] in any peculiar position, or… called third parties into existence” entails “obligations…on the part of both the contracting parties towards those third persons” (127). Nevertheless, he complains, the dissolving of a marriage “is usually discussed as if the interest of the children was everything, and that of grown persons nothing” (128). Undue consideration of children violated a wife's rights of liberty more than a husband's, for although children could thwart the unhappy man's attempt at liberty, under the law they were his property. A woman who desired freedom was irrevocably bound to a contract that made her children her adversaries and allied them with the father and the state.

A similar tension between the interests of children and adults tinges Matthew Arnold's defense of the traditional, hierarchical structure of the family in his remarks on the Real Estate Intestacy Bill, introduced in 1868. When Arnold refers disdainfully to the “natural right of children to share equally in the enjoyment of their father's property” as a “stock notion,” he is objecting to a sentimental and democratic view of familial relations, which favors the equal rights of each child over laws that ensure the legal and economic survival of the family. It is “unsafe and misleading to say that our children have rights against us,” he complained; “what is true and safe to say is, that we have duties toward our children” (175–76). Here, in Culture and Anarchy (1868), Arnold defends primogeniture and the survival of the upper-middle-class family as an institution (if not a sort of business); Mill, in contrast, blames the same institution for stifling the emotional development of adults.²¹

But both men feared that overvaluing children–viewing them as individual persons entitled to the same legal consideration as their peers or their parents–suspended the right of adults, either to sustain the family name as a socio-economic entity or to pursue their own individual happiness.

Like many of our own contemporaries, Meynell believed in the recent invention of childhood. Religious painting from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries were filled with doll-like children, she complained in Children of the Old Masters; the Christ-child of the first Italian masters Cimabue and Duccio di Buoninsegna has “the aspect of a strange small man” (14). In general, she writes in “That Pretty Person,” the “fashion of hurrying childhood prevailed in literature,” until “an age that has found all things to be on a journey…has caused the childhood of children to seem, at last, something else than a defect” (40, 42). But if Meynell anticipated the theory of Philippe Ariès in showing that no adequate concept of childhood existed before the middle of the eighteenth century, these three early poems suggest that recent studies may have underestimated the intensity of her estrangement from the age's sentimental and Romantic ideas (see Pollock and Orme). Although the politics of the family helps explain the adversarial attitude toward the child in the early poems of a woman who would participate in the suffrage marches of 1910–12, it was Meynell's early interest in both preserving and creating identity that colored her own views of children.²²

In accord with a teleological tradition of religion and science, she represented the self as meliorative, always in the process of casting off previous rational and emotional states. These sloughed identities remained, nonetheless, in one's physiological “memory,” as habitual motor actions and as a presiding muscular sense, neither traumatic nor repressed. Just as the representation of, and concern over, adult autonomy in “The Poet to His Childhood” and “A Study” reflects a larger struggle for female selfhood, a competing depiction of an abiding physiological self in all three poems, particularly in “A Letter,” assuages anxieties over the necessary loss of childhood's potential and beauty. A “new life” of grace in particular allows the woman of “A Study” an escape from the ideals and mistakes of her youth and simultaneously offers her a physiological sense of a child within, one which is simple, fresh, absolutely new–Romantic, in short–and superior to any actual childhood.

In maintaining continuity through drastic change, psycho-physiology anchored aging and religious conversion, two of the most drastic changes one could undergo, in an interiority wholly unrelated to the subject's remembered past. For if memory could maintain a self through such miraculous ruptures, that self would have to be based in the body and communicated, not through the Humean fictions of identity, but through non-cerebral media such as haptics. As Maudsley declares, because the selves of various epochs are different persons “with whom I have little or no sympathy…in the end I must needs feel very much obliged to my body for enabling me to preserve the conviction of my identity” (76). Meynell, who felt the tensions in the social and political identities of women and mothers, accordingly maintained a dependence and faith in the body as the repository of her unconscious “self” through every transformation in consciousness. She needed materialistic theory, not only to sustain an identity for the self over time, but to invest the adult mind with authority and to accommodate the doctrine of spiritual regeneration. Written before Freudian theories, based on early traumas and persistent drives, established our primary years as the fundamental, unconscious, often inimical, but enduring condition of being, Meynell's Preludes advocated, and suggest to us, Victorian materialists' conceptions of the self against childhood.