Gesture and Accent: The Portable, Theatrical Cri de Coeur

An extended consideration of Mew's own use of the term “cri de coeur” is necessary for two reasons. The misreading of her correspondence that has resulted in misconceptions about Mew's view of her own poetics for the last three decades must be corrected. More importantly, Mew's discussion of the cri de coeur highlights the influence that popular print and performance cultures exerted on her poetics, in general, and offers a model for understanding her speakers’ seemingly implausible shifts of language and behavior. Thus, an understanding of Mew's use of the cri de coeur can suggest a new and productive way to read her work.

The term “cri de coeur,” which connotes an impassioned lament, is in many ways an accurate description of the anguished language of “The Farmer's Bride.” In the poem, the farmer, whom Mew describes as a “rough country-man,” narrates his violent efforts to overcome, and finally his despair as he begins to come to terms with, his young wife's apparently unnatural resistance to consummating the sexual and social aspects of their marriage.Footnote ⁹ The passage that Cockerell describes as not “a natural cri de coeur” for the farmer is at the end of the poem, where the farmer, thinking about his wife sleeping alone in the attic above him with “but a stair / Betwixt us,” cries out

Cockerell objects specifically to the phrase “the brown of her,” which he takes to refer to the bride's “sunburnt arms & neck.”Footnote ¹⁰ The phrase, Cockerell implies, is out of character for the farmer—perhaps because Cockerell himself can't imagine why a man would find “brown” skin attractive and wants to offer the benefit of his masculine perspective to Mew. His objection may also lie in the disparity between the farmer's colloquial, uneducated language at the beginning of the poem—“when us was wed”; “she runned away”—and the desperate, rhythmic passion of the last lines (4, 9). Cockerell may have further shared the objections of his friend Wilfrid Blunt, who felt that for a woman poet to write in the voice of a man “takes away something of the poem's full sincerity,” or those of the Nation’s poetry critic Henry Nevinson, who found the farmer “much too sympathetic. A man can hardly imagine why the most sensitive of women should run out into the night to avoid him.”Footnote ¹¹ The implication in all three objections is that the farmer is implausible as a character because his speech and actions do not consistently conform to the expectations a reader might have—based on the author's name or the farmer's dialect—about the speaker's class location and gender. Instead, at the end of the poem the farmer's hesitant language and forbearance with the recalcitrant bride mark him as feminine and middle class—less like a well-drawn rustic character and more, as Fitzgerald would go on to imply, like Mew herself. Mew responded to Cockerell that it was impossible for her to change the lines:

From this letter, in which Mew responds to—and rejects—a specific suggestion from Cockerell, Fitzgerald, Mew's biographer, isolates the phrase “cri de coeur” as an important element in Mew's own poetics, one that functions as proof of a dramatic speaker's authenticity, “the test of truth.” Further, Fitzgerald, following Blunt's implications, suggests that this cry expresses Mew's own truth, disguised as her speaker's, since Mew's dramatic monologues are themselves almost involuntary “impersonation[s]”:

Fitzgerald's interpretation of the cri de coeur is misleading for several reasons. First, she implies that the cri de coeur and “the quality of emotion” belong to a single statement that Mew made about her own poetics—perhaps one that addresses the necessity of “impersonation.” In fact, as Fitzgerald's footnotes reveal, Mew's comments about “the quality of emotion” come from a letter written to a different correspondent, a year and a half before she wrote the letter to Cockerell. Fitzgerald also implies that “cri de coeur” was an important technical term for Mew, one she chose herself, while Mew's letter to Cockerell makes it very clear that “cri de coeur” is his phrase, not hers: “(I use your phrase).” Finally, Fitzgerald ends her discussion with a misreading of Mew's observation that “so one goes on—calling up witnesses to the real thing.” Fitzgerald interprets this to mean that “a cry has to be extorted, that is its test of truth”—implying that the cri de coeur in Mew's work is an involuntary burst of emotion.Footnote ¹⁴ But Mew's letter to Cockerell shows that what she finds useful about Cockerell's phrase is not the value of the cri de coeur as a test of raw emotional authenticity but its function as the distillation of an immediately recognizable character, complete with “the gesture and the accent.” The theatricality of both gesture and accent certainly associates them with strong emotion—but it emphasizes the external performance of emotion, the way in which a skilled artist might choose to convey feeling to her audience. For Mew, “calling up witnesses to the ‘real thing’” refers to what she herself is doing in her letter to Cockerell: thinking of additional examples of effective cris de coeur in literature and enjoying the “delightful company” of the characters associated with—and in fact defined by—such gesture[s] and “accent[s].” The “real thing” refers, perhaps paradoxically, not to sincerely felt emotion but to Mew's professional admiration for “real”—as in powerfully well-crafted—art(ifice).

Several critics, accepting Fitzgerald's misreading of Mew's letter, have also adopted Fitzgerald's implication that the cri de coeur was one of Mew's “aesthetic touchstones,” and many critics who do not borrow the term itself follow Fitzgerald in the assumption that Mew's monologues express her own helpless cry of pain or passion, only partially masked by the personae of her poems.Footnote ¹⁵ Such biographical reading practices, of course, are perennially applied to women poets; critics’ tendency to read Mew in this way is consistent with a tendency to read her work, if not to label her, as a nineteenth-century Poetess—despite the fact that as early as 1879, Augusta Webster had dismissed such reading practices with her reminder that, when it comes to poets, “As a rule, I does not mean I.”Footnote ¹⁶ Beginning with Fitzgerald's biography, which presents Mew as a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure composed of the decorous “Miss Lotti” and the more daring and passionate “Charlotte,” critics have seen Mew as tortured by so many conflicting identities and allegiances that her self-division appears overdetermined. Mew is divided between devotion to her family and a desire for artistic freedom; between painful shyness and overwhelming hilarity; and, most famously, between a ladylike prudishness and a passionate lesbian desire, a division that manifests itself in both her life and writing as a tension between silence and speech, concealment and revelation.Footnote ¹⁷ For these critics, the best emblem for Mew's poetics is the “red, dead thing”—the buried heart or aborted fetus—in her poem “Saturday Market” (line 20):

To read Mew's work as her own involuntary cri de coeur is to read it as a heart whose cry—or bloody stain—reveals itself despite her efforts to conceal or mask it. As Severin argues, “the desire for women briefly flickers” in the farmer's final cri de coeur, when the speaker is no longer plausible as Mew's “rough country-man” but is visible instead as “a woman poet impersonating a man.” Read in these terms, “The Farmer's Bride” expresses not only the cri de coeur of an uneducated farmer but of a woman poet whose frustrated desire for women's bodies can't be directly articulated and must slip out through the voice of a male speaker, inexpertly disguised by an unevenly applied country dialect. Whereas early in the poem, the writer's and reader's sympathies lie with the silent bride, Severin follows Fitzgerald's implication that our sudden surge of sympathy for the farmer in the last stanza is in fact sympathy for Mew's barely disguised voice as it breaks, almost unintentionally, into the poem.Footnote ¹⁸

Mew's desiring body, divided between passion and convention, is further understood by many critics to have produced a body of work divided by the conventional periods of literary history. As Joseph Bristow has explained, Mew is “hard to place, both culturally and historically,” partly because her literary career can be easily divided into two distinct periods, one in the 1890s and one in the 1910s.Footnote ¹⁹ Because of this, most critics choose a side, making a case for classifying Mew's work as either “Victorian” or “modernist.” Victorianists have made much of the fact that Mew's first published work, a short story called “Passed,” appeared in 1894 in the fin-de-siècle journal The Yellow Book. Two decades later, in 1916, Mew published The Farmer's Bride, the collection of poems upon which her literary reputation would rest; the book was reviewed by H. D. in the modernist journal The Egoist, and scholars have argued that Mew's work influenced T. S. Eliot's.Footnote ²⁰ In arguing for the inclusion of Mew's writing in the canon of a particular literary period—Victorian or modernist—critics nearly always acknowledge that her work lies at the furthest possible limit of either; Mew becomes a defining boundary of periodization, the last gasp of Victorianism or the first murmur of modernism. For Angela Leighton, Mew is “one of the last Victorians,” a child of the late nineteenth century whose imagery and subject matter owe more to the lyrics of Christina Rossetti than to the twentieth-century milieu in which she wrote her most famous poems.Footnote ²¹ According to other critics, Mew has been miscategorized as a Victorian “Poetess,” not because she writes on Victorian themes, but because of what Nelljean McConeghey Rice, paraphrasing Celeste M. Schenck, describes as Mew's “conservative, even genteel poetics,” which have distracted critical attention from the radicalism of her depictions of lesbian desire; for Rice, Schenck, and others, Mew is “one of the founders of a female modernism.”Footnote ²²

Some critics, however, most notably Joseph Bristow, Carrie Preston, and Kate Flint, have resisted the temptation to choose a side in these debates over periodization. Flint and Preston demonstrate that Mew's short stories and dramatic monologues, respectively, owe much of their power to the modernity of nineteenth-century social life and poetic form.Footnote ²³ Bristow argues that Mew's writing is “hard to place” in literary history not only because it is divided between centuries but because it formally and structurally enacts temporal displacement.Footnote ²⁴ In this way, Bristow suggests, Mew's work not only frustrates critics’ efforts to assign it to a particular literary period but calls into question the value of periodization itself. Yet even Bristow's powerful critique of scholarly efforts to “fix [Mew] in time,” and of the desire to solve the mystery of her literary, historical, and sexual allegiances, dissects Mew's work in order to identify its “Victorian” and “modern” components. According to Bristow, while the irregular form of some of Mew's poems “dramatizes the uncertainty of modern conditions,” her verse “nonetheless clings to the vestiges of rhythm and rhyme” bequeathed by Victorian poets.Footnote ²⁵ The image of a woman poet “cling[ing]” to the “vestiges” of an obsolete Victorian tradition is familiar from modernist narratives of the Victorian era, such as Eliot's “Portrait of a Lady” decorously “serving tea to friends” in what Ben Glaser has identified as a vestigial form of iambic pentameter.Footnote ²⁶ Although Bristow rejects the biographical speculation that dominates so much writing about Mew, nevertheless, in associating Mew's use of “rhythm and rhyme” with Victorian poetry and her formal and psychological experiments with modernism, his analysis bears a structural resemblance to accounts of Mew as divided between an artificial and old-fashioned propriety—what Rice calls “genteel poetics”—and a seemingly modern “radical sexual politics” that expresses Mew's authentic lesbian identity.Footnote ²⁷

Such debates about fragmentation and division in Mew's work begin to seem less relevant when we attend to Mew's own model of the cri de coeur and to the unbroken relationship it posits between nineteenth-century theatricality and her twentieth-century poetry. Mew's definition of the term reminds us of the significance that spoken, embodied performance played in the history and reception of her writing as well as in the literary communities to which she belonged. Mew began her career as a poet by reading her poems out loud at literary salons hosted by Catherine Dawson Scott (“Mrs Sappho”). Later on, Alida Klemantaski (later Monro) performed Mew's poems at London's Poetry Bookshop, where Klemantaski and the bookshop's founder, Harold Monro, published The Farmer's Bride ; Monro himself considered the performance of poetry to be an important aspect of literary culture.Footnote ²⁸

Mew's emphasis on “gesture” and “accent” associates the cri de coeur with stylized theatrical conventions that can be learned and practiced—quite different from the uncontrollable outburst that Mew's cri is often understood to be. In Victorian melodrama, standardized speech and gestures were two conventions that allowed audiences to immediately recognize familiar melodramatic types. Melodrama, too, provides a precedent for the inconsistencies in the farmer's diction as he moves from homespun regionalisms to grammatically correct but passionate lyricism. According to Carolyn Williams, the speech of the melodramatic hero is often divided between different levels of language use:

Not only does Mew foreground the artificiality of the cri de coeur by describing it in terms of the conventional gestures of the Victorian theater, she also associates the phrase with two figures familiar from the nineteenth-century stage: Marguerite Gautier and Sarah Gamp. Although they are not quite as conventional as melodramatic types, both Gautier and Gamp became famous through a variety of theatrical productions and were circulated readily within and across texts and performances as instantly recognizable cultural icons rather than plausible three-dimensional characters. As popular figures whose cultural presence exceeds the boundaries of the novels in which they first appeared, Gautier and Gamp resemble the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess to which Mew is often compared. While the expressive pathos of Gautier's “Je veux vivre” connects her more firmly with the “gush” of affect associated with the Poetess than does Gamp's demand for her “fair” share of alcohol, both can be linked to the Poetess through their repeatability and portability. As Yopie Prins, among others, has shown, the Poetess was a “repeatable trope” available to any writer, one that facilitated affective and textual circulation across national and generic boundaries.Footnote ³⁰ Like the Poetess, Gautier and Gamp do not reveal the contents of any real-life people's “hearts” but serve as vehicles for feeling—and for extractable catchphrases.Footnote ³¹ In her discussion of the cris de coeur of Gautier and Gamp, Mew calls attention to the modes of circulation that characterize Poetess writing by emphasizing the ways in which memorable catchphrases or “tags” circulate among and between texts, performances, and audiences. In yoking Gautier's yearning to Gamp's comic indignation, Mew demonstrates that, for her, the cri de coeur need not be associated with a particular affect or genre; the expressivity of the cri, and with it the figure of the Poetess, is useful to Mew as a formal structure that might invoke many literary and theatrical modes or transmit a range of feelings.

Marguerite Gautier, the consumptive courtesan heroine of Alexandre Dumas fils’s 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias, never utters “Je veux vivre” in the novel itself; Dumas added the line for the 1852 stage version, in which cry, gesture, and accent became more important, but in which these features varied widely based on the choices of the actress who played the role. The play was revived many times throughout the nineteenth century in Paris, London, and New York, with some of the century's most prominent actresses playing the leading role, including Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt; Bernhardt also starred in a 1911 film version. Mew herself, as she notes in a different letter to Cockerell, saw both Duse and “Sara” in the role: “& it was like light & darkness though both were great.”Footnote ³²

Sarah Gamp, an alcoholic nurse who plays a minor, comic role in Dickens's 1843–44 novel The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, was also immensely popular among Victorian audiences. Like Gautier, Gamp was as successful in performance as she was on the page, if not more so: Gamp was a major character in unauthorized theatrical adaptations of Martin Chuzzlewit that toured England throughout the nineteenth century, while Dickens himself capitalized on the character's popularity outside of the novel by giving frequent public readings of “Mrs Gamp” from a manuscript based on the sections of the novel in which she appears.Footnote ³³ An independent “sketch” Dickens had drafted in Gamp's voice was rediscovered and privately printed in New York in 1899—demonstrating the ease with which Dickens was able to detach Gamp entirely from Martin Chuzzlewit and suggesting that, at the turn of the twentieth century, there was a resurgence of interest on both sides of the Atlantic in Gamp as a stand-alone character.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, anthologies such as The Humour and Pathos of Charles Dickens (1884) and The Comedy of Charles Dickens (1906), collections of extracts that could be read aloud or performed in the family parlor, dedicated substantial sections to passages in the voice of Gamp. Readers were so taken with the character and with her ubiquitous umbrella that gamp remained a slang term both for an underqualified nurse and an umbrella well into the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁵

In this way both Gautier and Gamp are remarkable as characters for their portability—for the ease with which they detach from their original literary context and attach to different bodies and voices (Duse and Bernhardt) and even objects (umbrellas). Mew's choice of these portable figures, with their memorable dialects (French, cockney), suggests that she understands the cri de coeur to be a catchphrase or “tag,” like those phrases associated with Gautier and Gamp, that circulates and takes on new meanings in various contexts.Footnote ³⁶

Further evidence for the importance of the circulating “tag” may be found in Mew's unpublished short story “Thic Theer Kayser,” which is located among her papers in the British Library. Set in a small town on the Cornish coast at the outbreak of World War I and written sometime after war was declared in 1914, “Thic Theer Kayser”—Cornish dialect for “this there Kaiser”—has never been discussed in Mew criticism. Its use of humor makes it almost unique among Mew's writings; in the absence of the anguished characters featured in Mew's better known texts, this story, in conjunction with Mew's letters to Cockerell, gives us a fuller context in which to understand her theories about the aesthetic and affective power of the cri de coeur and the circulating “tag.”Footnote ³⁷ Throughout the story, the title phrase “thic theer kayser” circulates among the villagers as they discuss—in dialect—the intentions of Kaiser Wilhelm and the possibility of war with Germany. At the end of the story, Mew's omniscient narrator moves to a genteel drawing room where standard English is spoken instead of dialect, and the phrases that circulate are literary quotations. The hypocritical vicar of Weston preaches the importance of “self-control” during wartime, even though he himself believes the Apocalypse has come: “What is that tag of the old Greek philosopher?—‘Valour consists in the power of self-possession’—Nothing more true!” The vicar's authority is challenged, however, by “Miss Sladen (B.A.), the governess,” who ventures that she “thought the correct reading was self-recovery! And she believed it was Emerson. No, she was sure. Yes, she remembered now, she had seen the quotation in yesterday's ‘Daily Mirror.’ Emerson.”Footnote ³⁸

In correcting the vicar's quotation, Miss Sladen challenges his intellectual authority with her own less prestigious education. Since Oxford did not grant degrees to women students until 1920, and Cambridge not until 1948, Miss Sladen's B.A. could not have come from the university at which the vicar likely received the classical education he invokes in quoting “the tag of the old Greek philosopher” as well as the spiritual and cultural authority he wields over the parish. In keeping with the middle-class, feminine source of her own education, she bases her claim not on a classical text—the quote is indeed Emerson's, suggesting that Mew advances Miss Sladen's authority over the vicar's—or even on Emerson's original essay but from a “quotation in yesterday's ‘Daily Mirror.’” The Daily Mirror’s ephemerality is significant; in Mew's manuscript, she inserted the modifier “daily” in pencil after the story had already been typed, implying that as she revised, she decided that this quality of the newspaper was important to emphasize. As a daily paper that packaged literary culture in bite-sized, easily digestible extracts and “quotations” alongside advertisements for “Paisley's Flour,” depilatories, and children's medicine, the Daily Mirror exemplified the casual, miscellaneous, and disposable reading material popular with middle-class readers.Footnote ³⁹ Further, Miss Sladen's Emerson quotation invokes the rich print culture and readership that developed in the nineteenth century, including magazines and newspapers full of sentimental poems, printed scrapbooks, manuscript albums and commonplace books, and anthologies of extracts such as The Humour and Pathos of Charles Dickens.Footnote ⁴⁰ In privileging the mass-produced newspaper excerpt over the Latin “tag,” and the flexibility of “self-recovery” over “self-possession,” Mew's story champions the real-time, daily construction and reconstruction of the self in response to new ideas over the vicar's insistence upon his own cultural authority and reliance on the (imaginary) textual integrity of an unchanging classical canon.

When we read Mew's poems in the context of the adaptable print and performance cultures associated with Miss Sladen, Sarah Gamp, and Marguerite Gautier, the cri de coeur marks the poems’ speakers not as three-dimensional human beings overwhelmed by a secret passion but rather as adaptable dramatic figures, available to be “impersonated” (to use Fitzgerald's term) or interpreted by any number of actors, excerpted and quoted out of context, or even altered according to the shifting needs of the text itself. While Mew's assertion in her letter to Cockerell that “it seems to me that in the ‘cri de coeur’ … one either has or has not the person” implies a belief in the integrity of the farmer as a complete character, the examples she gives of the “test in literature of this ‘cri de coeur’”—Gamp's “Drink fair, Betsy, wot'ever you do!” and Gautier's “Je veux vivre,” both of which provide “not only the cry but the gesture and the accent”—in addition to the example of Miss Sladen's Emerson, suggest that perhaps Mew's speakers become a complete “person” not through verisimilitude but through their very textuality. Mew creates such a person by writing a script that might be complete on the page but might also flexibly accommodate other figures within and outside of the text; that might be extracted as “tags” and combined with other texts; or that might be further supplemented by “the gesture and the accent” of the performing body.Footnote ⁴¹

The Artifice of Passion in “The Farmer's Bride” and “The Fête”

Two of Mew's poems, “The Farmer's Bride” and “The Fête,” particularly illustrate her investments in the nineteenth-century print and performance cultures that she associates with the catchphrase or “tag.” Early audiences for both poems believed that they required supplementation by the voice and gestures of a performer.Footnote ⁴² The novelist May Sinclair, a friend of Mew's, lamented that “The Fête” would not be enjoyed by a wide audience, since it “absolutely needed [Mew's] voice, her face, her intonation and vehemence, to make it carry,” while Mew herself wrote to Cockerell, referring to Klemantaski's performances of her poems, that

Mew's and Sinclair's comments remind us that the breath which animates Mew's poetry is not a cri from Mew's coeur or her speakers’—the speakers, of course, are made of language and have no heart—but instead is “colour” that a reader or performer can pull or put into the poem. Even the language of “putting” and “pulling” suggests a certain elasticity that might allow the poem to be repurposed by its reader.

At the same time, these responses demonstrate that readers of both poems had difficulty fully appreciating Mew's work on the page. Both “The Fête” and “The Farmer's Bride” make use of surprising changes in diction and dialect that challenge readers’ ability to construct a consistent speaker from the text, a problem that the unifying voice of the performer makes irrelevant. In the readings that follow, I consider how such shifts in diction work on the page to dramatize the flexibility and portability of the poems’ language as speech that is available for any number of readers or performers to appropriate, supplement, alter, and transform. Further, the poems’ extractability, as well as their performance history as texts shared by small communities of performers and audiences, both echoes the formation of communities within the poem and invites different performers and audiences to create temporary communities through live performance and quotation. Using shifts in diction and rhyme scheme, Mew brings her speakers into brief proximity with different figures in the poem. Meanwhile, the collage-like form of each poem, composed as it is of different extractable sections, suggests that the poem is written to accommodate the performance styles of different readers. Mew places emphasis on the tenuous bonds the poem can create within and across its limits, rather than on the contents of a speaker's hidden core—or coeur. As dramatic monologues, the poems already participate in that genre's historical function of exposing identity as constructed and contingent. While the Browningesque dramatic monologue is known for the tension it creates between individual and community, however, the shifting diction in Mew's poems pushes the reader's focus outward toward the speaker's relationship with the community, or the performer's relationship with the audience, and away from the integrity or interiority of an individual character.Footnote ⁴⁴

In “The Fête,” Mew uses shifts in diction and dialect to make visible problems of translation and communication that, although they remain active, are less apparent in “The Farmer's Bride” and elsewhere in Mew's work. While critics of “The Farmer's Bride” might have doubted that the inconsistency of the farmer's dialect was deliberate, it is almost impossible to imagine that the polyglossia of “The Fête” is unintentional. Mew makes no effort to create a consistent “voice” for her adolescent speaker, a French schoolboy struggling to come to terms with the memory of an erotic encounter he had at a traveling fair. Instead, Mew marks different aspects of his identity—his Frenchness, his boyishness, his sense of wonder, his loss of innocence—at different moments in the poem through changes in the poem's diction, even in the language in which the poem is written. The poem veers from French phrases to British schoolboy slang to self-consciously “lyric” speech in standard English, sometimes within a single couplet or line, such as in this description of a girl at the fête: “Pauvrette, / How thin she was; but she smiled, you bet” (lines 67–68).

The apparent justification for these sudden shifts is the conceit that “The Fête,” as the thoughts or speech of a boy in France, was not “originally” composed in English. This conceit allows Mew to approach the problem of the speaker's diction as a problem of translation. When dealing with a text in another language, are the speaker's “gesture” and “accent” best captured through the transcription of the literal words he might speak (or write)—as Mew seems to have believed about Marguerite Gautier's cri de coeur, “Je veux vivre”? Or is the spirit of the boy's “gesture” and “accent” best conveyed to an English-speaking audience through the idiom of his closest English analogue, the British schoolboy? Or through the passionate medium of unmarked, “lyric” poetic language? Like a teaching edition of a classical text, in which the text in the original language is printed alongside the translation, “The Fête” invites the reader to keep two or more texts in mind at once in order to synthesize the imaginary text of the speaker's monologue—except that Mew's “translations” are mixed in with her “original” text. For this reason, the experience of reading “The Fête” on the page, without the benefit of Mew's vocal performance (a further translation), can be quite the opposite of the smooth, transparent experience of reading an idiomatic English translation of a French text.

Early in the poem, for example, as part of a complaint about the guard who is patrolling the dormitory hallways, the speaker refers to himself and his classmates colloquially as “us boys,” then immediately cries out, “Seigneur mon Dieu! the sacré soul of spies!” (9–10). As she does in “The Farmer's Bride,” Mew uses nonstandard grammar here to indicate a speaker's allegiance to a particular community: the language that marks the schoolboy as different from the educated adult English reader is also language that marks him as a distinct “character,” an element that allows for the recognition to which Mew alludes in her letter to Cockerell when she says “one either has or has not the person.” The French tags work in much the same way: a foreign phrase like “Seigneur mon Dieu!”, both exotic and immediately recognizable, produces a particular sense of passionate exasperation, a “gesture” and “accent” suited to a Catholic schoolboy in the throes of sexual anguish and guilt—a phrase that might fit both Mew's and Cockerell's definitions of a cri de coeur. It is noteworthy that the characters Mew cites in her discussion of the cri de coeur as examples of “the real thing,” Marguerite Gautier and Sarah Gamp, speak in French and a nonstandard English dialect, respectively. Yet the reader's ability to “ha[ve] the person” who would say “it was us boys”—as the reader might feel that she “has” the person who says “Je veux vivre” or “Drink fair, Betsy, wot'ever you do!”—is challenged by the fact that the same person says “Seigneur mon Dieu!” and, for that matter, the fact that the same slangy schoolboy often breaks out into passages of haunting lyric description, such as

Still more surprising shifts in diction can be found in the dizzy, second-person descriptions of “the fête” itself, in which Mew rhymes French and English slang words in the same couplet—in addition to the “Pauvrette / you bet” couplet, the boy explains that at the fair “you” could “hit, slick, the bull's eye at the tir, / Spin round and round till your head went queer” (63–64). While an English reader with some familiarity with French might find the rhymes to be sonically perfect, readers whose grasp of French pronunciation is much more or much less sophisticated might have to pause in their reading to reconcile the vowel sounds of “tir” and “queer”; further, the lack of eye rhyme is conspicuous for any reader. In this way, Mew's choice of rhyme words foregrounds the artificiality of the text.

The uncertainty this reading experience produces in the reader—the sensation of sometimes being closer to, sometimes being alienated from the boy's experience—mirrors, on the level of language, the intensity of the poem's confessions and the profound obscurity of some of its references, in which the boy's passionate but confused memories of an encounter with a woman appear to fuse with images from the fair or from places he encountered in his childhood:

Such experiences of readerly uncertainty also suggest the difficulty of cross-cultural and even interpersonal communication: in placing short phrases of French, English slang, and standard English speech alongside one another, rather than constructing a consistent voice that represents the speaker as a whole character, Mew brings the reader into closer proximity to a culture and an individual consciousness that the reader (and perhaps Mew herself) can never fully understand. Yet the poem never figures the French and English identities as a source of conflict for the speaker; “The Fête” is not a poem about a self fragmented by competing allegiances to incompatible cultures. Instead, the changes in dialect operate primarily upon the reader and the reader's ability to understand the speaker. The often frustrating impossibility of capturing the speaker's essence—of “hav[ing] the person”—becomes an opportunity for creativity as the poet assembles and reassembles a new person with the help of multiple tropes, types, and phrases, and for pleasure as the reader moves from one linguistic community to the next.

Reading “The Farmer's Bride” alongside “The Fête” shows that in both poems, Mew uses shifts in diction and dialect to comment on the pleasures, difficulties, and dangers of participating in a community. Throughout “The Farmer's Bride,” the farmer's diction changes as he positions himself in relation to different social and natural contexts. In changing the farmer's voice according to his changing allegiances, Mew invokes the sudden shifts of emotion characteristic of monodrama as well as characterizations (like the melodramatic hero's) whose “mixed speech” reflects competing social values; both genres, monodrama and melodrama, focus on the presentation of abstract emotions rather than the revelation of character.Footnote ⁴⁵ Considering the farmer's shifts in diction in the context of these theatrical genres makes it easier to see his resemblance to the melodramatic or monodramatic “type,” which A. Dwight Culler describes as a “formal thread on which the beads of passion are strung.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The farmer's changes in allegiance are indeed formal and in fact external, often coinciding with his physical proximity to other bodies and objects: a crowd of villagers, a feather, reddening berries, the bride herself. Driven by these proximities and affiliations, rather than by internal conflict, the farmer becomes a figure not unlike Prins and Jackson's Poetess, a vehicle that carries multiple meanings within the text—in this case a vehicle that, through live performance, can accommodate and communicate different performers’ “gestures” and “accents” to a variety of intimate and public audiences.

At the beginning of the poem, recalling a time when he was secure in his identity as a husbandman and therefore as a husband, the farmer's language is matter-of-fact, his authority as a speaker unquestioned: “Three Summers since I chose a maid,” he asserts, dismissing the doubt that she might have been “too young maybe” with the practical point that the business of running a farm didn't leave much time to “bide and woo” (lines 1–3; my emphasis). When the bride he chose rejects him—“she runned away”—the farmer attaches himself more firmly to the authority of the community, whose members speak in the same “rough” country dialect that the farmer has used in the poem so far (9). First, the farmer uses “them” as a resource for information about his wife's whereabouts: “‘out ’mong the sheep, her be,’ they said” (10). Then he merges with that “they” to become an inexorable “we,” a hunting party, insistent on restoring the bride to the domestic space where she belongs: “We chased her, flying like a hare … We caught her, fetched her home at last / And turned the key upon her, fast” (15, 18–19). Although only one person can feasibly turn a key in a door, the farmer attributes this last act of suppression to the whole community, perhaps hoping to downplay his own responsibility for his wife's imprisonment, perhaps longing for the certainty conferred by collective authority.

By the third stanza, however, when the bride has been restored to the farm, the farmer's allegiances begin to transform again; his ties to the community as a whole are loosening. He still speaks as an “us,” but now the “us” refers to the “men-folk” from whom the bride shrinks, in opposition to “the women” who know more about the bride, even if they're willing to tell on her: “The women say that beasts in stall / Look round like children at her call” (27–28). Then, in an explosion of agonized loneliness or perhaps childlike petulance, the farmer bursts out, “I've hardly heard her speak at all,” breaking his ties to men, women, and patriarchal authority to return to the solitary I from the poem's first line (29; emphasis in the original).

As if this return to the I has also transformed the farmer into a Petrarchan lover, at this moment the poem erupts into gorgeous lyric:

Throughout the poem, the rhyme words in each stanza have been moving closer together and multiplying: quatrains with enclosed or alternating rhymes give way to couplets, couplets become triplets, so that the repeating sounds in the poem have become more insistent and obsessive. The effect culminates in this stanza, where there is only one rhyme sound, and where each of the first three lines ends with a word referring to the bride, in the terms of the farmer's rapturous blazon: the “he” that refers to the leveret which the bride resembles in her shyness and swiftness, but also perhaps in her unconventional gender presentation (in her revulsion against her husband's “love,” the farmer tells us early in the poem, she “wasn't a woman”); the “young larch tree”; the “she” who is “sweet as the first wild violets.” The last line ends with “but what to me?”—another agonized cri de coeur, perhaps, lamenting the farmer's exclusion from the bride's autoerotic relationship “to her wild self,” but also an open question. One answer might lie in the rhyme scheme: in rhyming “me” with words that have only described the bride, the farmer associates himself with her. This stanza dramatizes a new strategy by which the farmer seeks to reunite with his bride: not through legal or cultural authority but through sonic and structural mirroring.

By the next stanza, both farmer and bride are missing, replaced by the lyric description and natural imagery that the farmer's blazon introduced. In focusing only on images—

—and in all but eliminating the colloquialism from his speech, the farmer approaches the bride still more closely, gesturing toward her silent communion with the natural world rather than deploying its imagery to depict her as an erotic object. Just as Mew's references to Gamp's and Gautier's memorable catchphrases posited the cri de coeur as an agent of decontextualization, one that isolates a character or line (such as “Je veux vivre”) from the text in which it originally appeared, the cri de coeur “but what to me?” seems to have ushered in an extreme decontextualization: in this stanza, the social, literary, and sexual meanings that have accumulated around the poem's images seem to fall away, in favor of an aesthetic where hierarchies of meaning are flattened out, and where images seem to be arranged only according to a logic of proximity and simultaneity. The falling leaf echoes the shape and the implied gesture of the fallen feathers; the “spotted feathers,” the white rime, and the “black earth” present a series of surfaces that touch one another but remain distinct, suggesting a mode of connection other than the violence, enclosure, and penetration imposed by the legal, agricultural, and literary models of love and marriage that have governed the poem so far. Like the snatches of lyric that, as Herbert F. Tucker argues, interrupt the historicizing social context of Browning's dramatic monologues, this passage opens up the possibility of release from the exigencies of social life. Or perhaps it suggests the possibility of a different kind of social life, not necessarily Tucker's “choral dissolution that lurks in lyric voice,” but a collage or assemblage arranged, as a reader might arrange a scrapbook or an evening of recitation, by formal and linguistic affiliations—a shared language, a mirrored shape—rather than by legal authority.Footnote ⁴⁷ For the space of these few lines, the poem suggests that the shared experience created by Mew's aesthetics of decontextualization and quotation has the power to create community.

Like the lyric interruptions Tucker cites, this one ends with a return to the social world as we know it—a world that recruits natural imagery to do its work. The spell is broken by the “berries” that “redden up to Christmas-time” (line 39). Even “rough country-men” mark natural time according to human calendars, and Christmas is both the time when red berries ripen and a religious holiday beloved of children. The lyric impersonality vanishes from the farmer's language; the social imperative returns, and with it, another cri de coeur in the farmer's dialect: “What's Christmas-time without there be / Some other in the house than we!” (40–41). This “other”—named in the poem only by its absence—is the child whose presence would validate the farmer's domestic Christmas celebrations. The child's spectral nonappearance at the end of the stanza, at the moment when the poem's natural imagery is once again fused to cultural life, reminds the farmer that his celibate marriage, however harmonious it may have seemed with the winter landscape, violates both natural and cultural law: the bride, unlike the “redden[ed-] up” berries, has not ripened into fertility. The failure to procreate is a failure to participate in community celebrations such as Christmas and a failure to fulfill the primary goal of marriage as defined by the church: procreation.

With its invocation of the celibate family's failure to fulfill their social, religious, and possibly their “natural” responsibilities, the farmer's penultimate cri de coeur puts an end to his idyll among the decontextualized, nonreproductive images of the winter landscape and carries him to the last stanza, in which his hope for union with the bride is faltering and his language focuses on their mutual isolation and the rawness of his desire. The farmer's forays into community authority, Petrarchan courtship, and seemingly impersonal natural description, however, seem to have honed his attention on the bride herself: he is seeing her, or allowing the reader to see her, as a living human body for the first time, at the end of a poem in which she has been livestock, quarry, a muse, and a diffuse natural atmosphere. In this context, the exclamation that Cockerell calls a cri de coeur, although it certainly functions as an expression of frustrated sexual desire, may be more interesting to Mew as an index of the power and limits of language to create community. The farmer and bride cannot be brought to understand each other throughout the poem—for one thing, the trauma caused by the violence of their initial encounter may be irreparable—but the poem itself might create communities of performers, readers, and listeners, either through live performance or through recognition or quotation of the poem as a familiar text. The farmer's changing diction, often marked by what Cockerell might call a cri de coeur and what we might characterize as a catchphrase or “tag,” functions here to bring various figures into contact throughout the poem—the farmer and the villagers, the farmer and the bride, the farmer and the reader, the reader and the bride—both through the connections the farmer makes with his own dialect, choice of pronouns, and rhyme scheme as well as through the medium of the “tags” themselves, as invitations to performance and quotation.

In “The Farmer's Bride” and “The Fête,” then, Mew's use of the cri de coeur both invites performance and structurally enacts the way in which such “tags” or catchphrases help form wider, often unexpected communities of performers, listeners, and readers. Both poems demonstrate the role language can play in creating community and the limits of that role; both produce linguistic pleasure in movement from one community to the next. As texts for performance they invoke popular theatrical genres, including melodrama and monodrama; cinematic adaptation; Dickens's live readings and the unauthorized stage productions that took liberties with his text; and public poetry performance, private drawing-room recitations, and the semipublic culture of the literary salon. As printed texts they invoke related, similarly contingent and citational genres: the book of extracts, the scrapbook and the commonplace book, the daily newspaper. For Mew, the tag or cri is a unit of language and emotion immediately recognizable to the middle-class reader and immediately assimilated, as the title of the Daily Mirror suggests, into her daily life. In this way, the cri de coeur facilitates the creation of readerly communities, uniting readers in their recognition and enjoyment of a particular character or phrase.

For many critics, Mew's middle-class, Victorian gentility is at odds with her participation in avant-garde modernist culture. Yet as Mew's letters suggest, the nineteenth-century genres she invokes in her work were still an active, thriving part of cultural life in the early twentieth century. “Thic Theer Kayser,” a World War I story written at perhaps the starkest moment of historical transition between Victorian and modernist literary sensibilities, reminds us that Mew is decidedly a figure of her own time, writing about contemporary events in a contemporary way. Genres, texts, and people that had their origins in the nineteenth century continued not only to exist but to play an active cultural role in the twentieth century: as Miss Sladen's Emerson quotation shows, the language of nineteenth-century America continued to be relevant to the daily round of information delivered by such popular reading material as the Daily Mirror, a publication whose name suggests its function in reflecting quotidian contemporary life. Similarly, the “gamp” was a familiar term in twentieth-century speech; Marguerite Gautier appeared on twentieth-century cinema screens; and aging Victorian women such as Bernhardt and Duse—to say nothing of fiftysomething Charlotte Mew herself—were actively creating and consuming culture, publishing books, originating roles, and, in Bernhardt's case, acting in the new medium of film. These artists, as Mew insisted to Cockerell, were twentieth-century women, not Victorians who had outlived their usefulness: in her 1922 discussion of Duse, Mew worries that Cockerell will consider Duse to be “too old” but asserts, “there's no one like her.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Mew's engagement with nineteenth-century print and performance genres points to their continuing influence on twentieth-century literature: the Victorian Poetess, the melodrama, the elegant extract, mixed and broken meters, irregular rhyming, the gestures of Eleonora Duse, and the comic associations of the “gamp”—not to mention the cri de coeur itself, a term that entered English speech in the 1890s—all circulate in early twentieth-century culture as material from which poetry might be assembled and into which it might be disassembled. Mew's incorporation of some of these materials into her poetic practice is a creative use of the materials at hand, not necessarily a modernist rejection of ladylike Victorian prudishness and preciousness, nor a nostalgic “clinging” to familiar forms.

The fact that Mew has so frequently been read otherwise—that readers and critics from Fitzgerald onward have been surprised that such a prim, middle-aged lady could write such passionate poetry—points us again to the forms of prejudice that pervaded modernist depictions of the aging, supposedly irrelevant Victorian Poetess. Amused surprise at the passion of an older woman is inextricable from surprise that the “experimental” elements of Mew's writing could coexist with “Victorian” sensibilities. Attending to Mew as a figure of her own time is crucial not only to our understanding of her work but to a better understanding of the messy texture of literary history as it was written and read, in relation to literary and nonliterary genres, across and alongside the borders of conventional literary periods.