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Reflections of Love: Mary Lamb, Percy Shelley, and The KeepsakeLiterary Annual

After providing a lengthy list of Mary Lamb's works and accomplishments, the Feminist Companion to Literature in English concludes the summary by observing that "most studies make her a footnote to Charles." Although recent scholarship has rescued Mary Lamb from this fate, her image still remains bound to that of her brother. While the notion of a "double singleness" privileges Mary in respect to his writing, it almost denies her a separate persona: a self of her own. Ironically, it is this very notion of self-a notion hampered by 19th century restrictions against both women and the insane-which Mary Lamb's writings attempt to construct. While Mary's need to construct "self" instead of reflecting on it may relate to her experiences of manic depression and social repression, she reaches beyond such categorizations to question the very notion of a unified self.

In order to fully understand Mary Lamb's response to dominant ideology, I propose to use Shelley's "On Love" and Mary Lamb's "What is Love?" to briefly discuss "reflexive" ideology in relation to texts influenced by Mary Lamb's social situation and manic depressive illness.

The poem "What is Love?" appears a few pages after Percy Shelley's celebrated, oft-quoted essay "On Love" in the Keepsake for 1829. Although Shelley had written this essay in 1818, Mary Shelley decided to publish it independently. While we do not know much about either woman's reason for publishing, we do know that Mary Lamb and Mary Shelley occupied similar literary circles; Edward Moxon, Mary Shelley's publisher and Mary Lamb's adopted son-in-law, mentioned both in several of his letters. Although evidence is scarce, it is difficult to believe that, without having read Shelley's essay, Mary Lamb would have echoed the first line and other major points so precisely. For all of these reasons, I propose to view this short poem as a response to Shelley, the limits of self, and the "Greater Romantic" ideology of love.

Targeting a growing number of middle-class women readers, the elegant, rather expensive Keepsake for 1829 provides a unique background for such a dialogue. After Percy Bysshe Shelley's death, Mary Shelley played a large part in resuscitating and altering his image; accomplishing this in a woman's journal could ensure more loyalty (not to mention some badly-needed money) from a growing body of female readers. The success of Mary Shelley's "strategy" soon became apparent; responding to "On Love," the 1828 Athenaeum described Shelley as "one of the most earnest, affectionate, truth-seeking, humble, and self-denying men that ever lived on this earth." Indeed, in her 1840 Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley commented that "Shelley's own definition of Love reveals the secrets of the most impassioned, and yet the purest and softest heart that ever yearned for sympathy, and was ready to give its own lavish measure in return" (Ingpen, 361). Clearly, both Mary Shelley and F.M. Reynolds (the editor of the 1829 Keepsake) hoped to posthumously alter Shelley's radical, extremist image to one of "feminine" selflessness.

Although Shelley does attempt to transcend the self in his discourse on love, the platonic context as well as the very text of this essay deny the primacy of such a reading. Although "On Love" strives for the selflessness praised in Shelley's preface to Alastor, the essay, written concurrently with a translation of Plato's Symposium, centers on Plato's primarily self-reflexive philosophy.

In the Symposium, Aristophanes depicts humans as divided beings searching for their other halves. Only by "possess[ing] the other half of himself"(134)-owning something rightfully his-can a person achieve completion. Although Shelley's essay may also allude to the Bible and to Victor Frankenstein's "creation," the notion remains the same:

We are born into the world, and there is something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness (71).

Whereas Plato would start with the physical and end with the intellectual, Shelley believes that a mental union must proceed any meaningful sexual one. Such notions, previously developed in "A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love," feature in popular novels and poetry by women and would undoubtedly have pleased a female reading public. Yet, they alone cannot preclude a narcissistic image of love.

In fact, Shelley's model of intellectual union appears precisely as a product of imagination and exclusion; he describes intellectual nature as:

. . . a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap (72).

Here, his language is one of alienation; far from the otherness assumed in his introduction, the Shelley of "intellectual nature" exists of and for the self. The beloved soul is now "within the soul," and the "proper paradise" becomes a neatly divisive circle (it both maintains the self and keeps others out). In Percy Bysshe Shelley's mental utopia, the realities of life-the pain, sorrow, and evil of the world-cannot intervene. It is precisely the emotions, connections, and feelings praised by Mary Shelley and Keepsake readers which become abjected from Shelley's narcissistic notion of self.

Although Mary Lamb's restrained verse could be seen as sentimental entertainment for Keepsake audiences, I would argue that "What is Love?" does provides a woman's answer to Shelley's elevated views:

Love is the passion which endureth,
Which neither time nor absence cureth
Which nought of earthly change can sever
Love is the light which shines for ever.
What cold and selfish breasts deem madness
Lives in its depths of joy and sadness:
In hearts, on lips, of flame it burneth;
One is its world-to one it turneth.
Its chain of gold-what hand can break it?
Its deathless hold-what force can shake it?
Mere passion aught of earth may sever,
But souls that love-love on for ever.

Presumably written in 1828-amidst recurring bouts of mania and worries about Charles' drinking-this short poem illustrates Mary Lamb's search for unified identity by incorporating her emotions and "madness" into a socially refined notion of love. Since this very search for self-the secure self from which Shelley can theoretically shut out the world-spanned much of Mary's life, I feel that an exploration of biographical and medical factors is necessary to an understanding of her work.

Since her parents' work as servants to the wealthy landowner Samuel Salt occupied much of their time, Mary often found herself doing housework, reading, or taking care of her little brother Charles.

Until 1792, the Lambs' lives followed a relatively normal pattern. In that year, Samuel Salt died; suddenly and unexpectedly, the family had to leave their home and begin a life of comparative poverty. For Mary, a young girl already suffering from slight nervous disorders, this change proved particularly painful. In her 1815 essay "On Needlework," she describes a woman's life of constant, unrewarded work:

Many a lady who does not allow herself one-quarter of an hour's positive leisure during her waking hours, considers her own husband as the most industrious of men if he steadily pursue his occupation till the hour of dinner. . .(British Ladies' Journal).

(The irony here becomes inescapable when one reflects that the standard time for "dinner" was between three and four!).

When her mother began to decline in health and lost use of her legs, the burden of Mary's responsibilities grew ever larger. Day and night, she spent her free time by her mother's bedside. In September of 1795, the excessive strain of her life proved too much for her manic depressive disorder; not realizing her own actions, Mary Lamb killed the mother she had respected, loved, and dutifully taken care of .

At this point, I could proceed by attempting to answer the haunting question- why did she do it? Attempts at obtaining an answer have, however, shown Mary Lamb as a symptom instead of a real woman. In A Double Singleness, Aaron utilizes Melanie Klein's theory that, in order to disprove internal anxieties between good and bad ego-aspects, the manic depressive often escapes to one extreme:

The result is a conception of extremely bad and extremely perfect objects, that is to say, its loved objects are in many ways intensely moral and exacting (Klein, 123).

Faced with and limited by such theories, critics may find it all too easy to extend the argument to Mary Lamb; by killing her "bad" mother, this manic depressive enabled herself to retain her perfect one. Such an explanation takes us far from the world of Mary Lamb: a world shadowed by a real illness and not a psychoanalytic idealization. In the quest for explanations, Mary Lamb has been read as a woman defined either by propriety or madness. Yet, unlike the doppelgänger character popularized through Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Mary Lamb herself was not, and should not be read as, a romantic text.

Escaping this trap involves an exploration of the 19th century perceptions of the biochemical disorder which played an essential part in Mary Lamb's complex notion of self. Often viewing manic depressive illness as a result of "frail nerves," physicians at the time prescribed social conformity as a route to sanity. Since asylums were inhabited primarily by women, the contagion of madness became a virtual threat to male virtue. Indeed, by locating psychological illness in events like pregnancy and menstruation, 19th century beliefs attempted to "pathologize" the real woman (Martin, 34). Like the real woman, a female mental patient could only achieve a "cure" by restricting her desires, actions, and lifestyle. Charles Lamb's letters serve to confirm this notion; since both Mary and Charles equated her illness with undue excitement, she often stayed in bed and received no visitors. In between episodes, Mary acted the part of the "proper woman" so well that biographers like Talfourd marvel at the disparity between her two "selves":

Little could any one, observing Miss Lamb in the habitual serenity of her demeanor, guess the calamity in which she had partaken or the malady which frightfully checkered her life (Gilchrist, 91).

Although much of this socially prescribed restraint mirrors the very 19th century restraints placed on all women, current research has shown that we cannot entirely discount the effect of life events on manic tendencies. While manic depression is a chemical disorder, studies show that early, traumatic life events may activate an existing genetic vulnerability (Goodwin and Jamison, 25). A 1995 survey found that 53% of women suffering from manic depression reported a severe, independent event at the onset of an attack; the closer they were to a stressful or potentially life-altering event, the more unstable and depression-prone these patients became (Johnson and Roberts, 439). Although a strictly biographical reading of Mary Lamb's illness remains highly reductive, these studies do allow us to consider the "stressful," "traumatic" events defining a life of struggle, illness, and sacrifice.

Having said this, I wish to maintain the importance of viewing bi-polar disorders as largely genetically determined; although 19th century society and Mary Lamb herself may have attempted to counter the illness by restricting anxieties, both biology and social influences eventually subsumed any notions of self-control. As Goodwin and Jamison aptly state, it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle personality from "a psychologically expressed, yet constitutionally based illness" (281). When social forces combine with a genetic predisposition, the boundaries between social text and the "text" of body become blurred. During manic episodes, the bi-polar patient becomes increasingly sensitive to perceived rejection or criticism; led to exaggerate or mis-interpret the comments of others, patients may feel a sense of persecution, worthlessness, or self blame. During an intense manic episode-such as the one Mary Lamb experienced that fateful day-acts of violence and assault are common; 46-75% of episodes result in such behaviors (303). Viewing cases like that of Mary Lamb, it becomes increasingly important to see such violence as genetically-not morally-constituted .

The psychological implications of extreme mania appear in an unstable notion of self; although Mary Lamb may not have remembered her episodes, her writings illustrate her alternate struggle with and acceptance of the fact that they did, to some degree, define her. Although he discusses Virginia Woolf's illness, Caramagno's exploration of manic depression as an illness which destroys "self-structure" is only intensified in terms of 19th century restrictions:

Depressed patients typically identify the self with the external world, and in this confusion between inner and outer, perception itself destroys the perceiver's sense of self. . . (16).

Mary Lamb succeeds in escaping a "sense of self" based solely on the external ( on social expectations or the implications of her illness) by refusing to conform to a unified notion of identity; instead of blocking out what Shelley called the "pain and sorrow and evil" of life, Mary counters the debilitating effects of her disease by incorporating extremes into a revisionary notion of self.

For all the uncertainty, anxiety, and doubt plaguing Mary Lamb's literary existence, it is in her writings that she can re-think self by encompassing rather than excluding her illness. While the act of writing may come with its own anxieties for women of the time, her example also allows for writing to dispel the anxieties concerning a socially constructed self. Although Gilbert and Gubar discuss women's writing in terms of an "alienation that felt like madness" (51), Mary Lamb manages to turn the equation around: to show that, coming from a context of "madness," writing may allow her socially denied possibilities for self-construction.

Mary Lamb's few, underexplored poems best exemplify her complex-and often practical-reactions to the realities and expectations of her time. In an attempt to dispel the prevalent image of Mary Lamb-one of either madness or frail reticence-I turn first to "Helen," a poem Mary wrote around 1800 to tease Charles about an unrequited love. Through the meter, words, and tone, we see the author holding her breath to keep from bursting into unrestrained laughter. To quote just one stanza:

High-born Helen, proudly telling
Stories of thy cold disdain;
I starve, I die, now you comply,
And I no longer can complain (Lucas, 26).

Without a husband or serious lover, Mary must have found it difficult to confront her brother's real, realizable passions. Especially for women of the time attempting to escape the category of the insane, the concept of sexuality became a virtual threat:

Unconventional sexual behavior in women-premarital intercourse, erotic fantasies, seductiveness, obscene language and orgasmic excitement-was clinically defined as nymphomania (Showalter, 324).

In order to escape this, she paints her brother's sexual desires as unrealizable by pointing to class differences (between the "high-born" Greek goddess and a son of servants) and depicting his affection as almost ridiculous. What we read here is not the overly-nervous, frail Mary Lamb. Rather, we see a woman who feels envy, affects sarcasm, and subtly mocks her enamored brother. Although "Helen" would not rank as one of Mary Lamb's most profound works, it assumes its importance in showing us the human qualities of its author.

By 1808, Mary Lamb's reflections on self had expanded to include a personal interpretation of an extreme love. "Salome," a poem concerning Herodias' passionate daughter, shows precisely that, far from retreating from madness into propriety, Mary could explore extreme passion as a part of life. Until the forth stanza, the poem basically relates the story of Salome (Lucas, 36), her passion for the "severely good" John the Baptist, and her final bequest to have his head. Although many accounts and interpretations have accompanied the tale, Mary Lamb refuses to interpret Salome herself. Instead, she illustrates only what others, the painters of another age, would see. Rather than depicting Salome as an improper woman consumed by extreme passions, Mary Lamb leaves us-much as her own biography does-with more questions than answers. The painters "make" her look at the severed head "as if" her act caused her great joy or gratification. Like generations of readers debating how much Mary Lamb remembered about her mother's death, these painters form their own-not necessarily correct-interpretations. Assuming that Salome "betrayest not one spark/Of feeling for the ruthless deed," they could very well be giving their opinions of Mary Lamb and the extreme consequences of her love. By forcing her readers to question instead of giving concrete answers, Mary Lamb suggests that a sense of self need not be-and often is not-clear-cut or coherent.

Although Mary Lamb can, to an extent, serve as a representation of contemporary woman, we must explore such varied experiences of self if we wish to really see her "argument" concerning love. With this in mind, I return to "What is Love?" as a response to Shelley's essay.

Although very little evidence exists concerning the composition of this poem, Mary Lamb did submit it independently; Charles had condemned annuals-and especially The Keepsake-for their "ostentatious trumpery" (Ledbetter, 7). Nonetheless, followed by the initials M.L., Mary Lamb's poem appears with those of other women: Mary Shelley (named only as "the author of Frankenstein"), Felicia Hemans, L.E.L. (Laetitia Elizabeth Landon), and others. Similar to the writings on love and courtship which dominate the volume, Lamb's poem could illustrate a socially accepted type of woman's poetry: the regular meter and rhyme scheme, even stanzas, and sentimental tone (phrases like "Love is the light which shines for ever" or "its chain of gold") seem well-suited for a "woman's book"* like The Keepsake.

Yet, as Mary herself wrote in a children's poem "Written in the First Leaf of a Child's Memorandum-Book,"

My writing, all misshaped, uneven as my mind
Within this narrow space can hardly be confin'd
(Hutchinson, 448).

If we read further into Shelley's essay, we will find that, following his initial question "What is love?", he continues with "Ask him who lives, what is life?" In the narrow space of an acceptable woman's poem, Mary Lamb answers both questions by describing love in terms of her own life. Describing love as "passion," -a passion defined by the love of souls-she both accepts and rejects elements of Shelley's argument. Although she clearly sees love as transcending mere sexuality, she cannot close it off from the disruptive elements of life.

Mary Lamb's strongest response to Shelley's essay lies in her resistance to removing external circumstances from the notion of love. To re-phrase Shelley, love is a "proper paradise which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap." How different is this from the active type of love which Mary Lamb practiced: a love which dealt with the pain of her illness, the sorrow of Charles' drinking, or the evils of social repression? How can it relate to a love which, like Salome's or, seemingly, like Mary Lamb's, actually contains varying elements of the self? The answer lies in the fact that, instead of viewing love in a self-reflexive manner, Mary Lamb saw love as a means to define the self. In two lines,

What cold and selfish breasts deem madness
Lives in its depths of joy and sadness

, Mary Lamb virtually defines the experience of manic depression. Writing years later in 1952, John Custance describes his bi-polar illness in a similar fashion: "On my strange journey there were giddy heights as well as depths" (Goodwin and Jamison, 52), he writes. Instead of ignoring a socially unacceptable illness (and its accompanying behaviors), "What is Love?" incorporates it as a formative but non-definitive version of self.

Although a gendered "formula" would prove convenient, I find that such a thing cannot exist. Mary Lamb's very response to Percy Bysshe Shelley finds its strength in its multiplicity; as in her writings and life, she provides an open-ended interpretation of love. Although many may undervalue such ambiguity (in women's writing in general or in Mary Lamb's willingness to examine the extremes of life), it offers an equally valid model of life. If I equate "cold and selfish breasts" with a self-reflexive model-a love which encircles itself in the intellectual and refuses to reach out to others-, Lamb's validation of her "madness" lies in the fact that she never retreated from "joy and sadness." Literature and history have often linked the notion of male madness with a vision of higher truth; here, I would like to consider Mary Lamb's illness as a contributing force to her vision of humanity's essential incoherence.

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