Senaha, Eijun

SEX, DRUGS, AND MADNESS IN POETRY FROM WILLIAM BLAKE TO CHRISTINA ROSSETTI:
Woman's Pain, Woman's Pleasure

1996 0-7734-2276-5
Defining pain and pleasure as synonyms to describe woman's condition in nineteenth-century England, this study closely examines poems by both well and lesser-known poets as representatives. The study asserts that women, in both Romantic and Victorian poems, tend to seek pleasure as their remedy for physical as well as mental pain in their caged environment. Along with references to Mary Wollstonecraft, Caroline Norton, Florence Nightingale, and John Stuart Mill, the comprehensive discussion includes William Blake, Sara Coleridge, Lady Caroline Lamb, Maria Logan, Henrietta O'Neill, Anna Seward, Isabella Lickbarrow, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti. Several critical methods, such as source as well as biographical studies, the Foucauldian interpretation of social history, and Freudian analysis of individual symbols and imageries are applied to throw light on woman's culture in 19th-century Britain.