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CHAPTER 3

MULTIPLE VOICES OF WOMAN IN SARAH PIATT'S POEMS

Among women writers of the 19th century American literature Sarah Morgan

Bryan Piatt was also one who has also contributed to the writing of women. From

much impressing themes, this chapter elaborates the very personality of a woman of

the 19th century conventional era. The multiple of voices of women in transition of

roles as a beloved, a wife and a mother represented by Sarah Piatt’s poems are

discussed.

By Sarah Piatt, immense poems were written at different stages of women. It

is studied and understood that she was under the influence of contemporary social

issues, including the nature and role of women in all aspects. Sarah Piatt is given the

‘light of perfection’ to give good reason for the roles of her, as a woman and as a

writer all the more. Sarah Piatt ventured into modern poems by introducing resisting

voices of women in her poems, establishing genteel values and turning them into a

vehicle by which she could explore the artistic and moral limitations of her society.

This study substantiates the concept of marginalization of woman from the main

stream of known and famous American writers, with the reasons with ‘if not she, then

who would’ and with a sense of admiration for her social and thematic inclusions.

In order to voice the women’s aspirations and emotions Sarah Piatt has chosen

the role of a speaker as a beloved, wife and a mother. Throughout her poems, many

relevant ample evidences are displayed which are considered as the design to decorate

the very view or the quality of the pattern of her state in three important roles of a

woman. It is observed that whenever the society speaks about a woman or about the

woman’s society as a whole, ‘Motherhood’ stands with ‘A’ priority among all the

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other qualities. Because, the ‘motherhood’ with its best qualities which would rather

bring additional aspects of a woman of ‘being a mother.’ Usually motherhood

establishes the nature of ‘mothering’ to her children and combines the household

activities or the responsibilities.

In recent years of the novelty in twenty first century, the term ‘responsibility’

is exchanged with the meaning of / as ‘working’ and thereby the construction of

voices for the working for family-hood is criticized with ‘adjectives of qualities of

‘feminism.’ Yet, amidst the core of the problematic situations under the regime of

Queen Victoria, and the Victorian sensibilities, the perspectives of social attitudes and

activities are observed in Sarah Piatt’s conventionally ‘fit’ poems. This controlled her

‘stock-exchanging’ voices of her gender. On the whole she did not criticize against

male-subjugation and woman’s ‘erring’. She neutralized the standard of both the

social genders and instructed her opposite sex with some strong and actively lessoning

phrases to make them realize the nature of subjugation of woman. She has criticized

with an adequate amount of rights from her own state of being woman in a Victorian

standard, for the cause of imbalanced society due to the lack and negligence of

responsibility of women society for the better and morally strong lineage of her New

Land (America).

In the hierarchical status the confrontation among the roles of Sarah as

beloved, wife and mother, motherhood persists to claim the topmost level of a woman

and it is the source of transition or the evolution of stages. Sarah Piatt’s expression of

the conventional role of motherhood could no way be related to feministic exposures

of recent decades.

In American history ‘‘the woman movement’ awakened in the 1840s was in

the context of abolition of slavery by giving voice against the slavery and against the

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denial of voting rights to the white women” (Susan E. Chase & Mary F. Rogers 4-5).

From the motherhood’s responsibilities like, educating, disciplining, protecting,

sacrificing, comforting, supporting, organizing, doing domestic duties, and attending

to the details of children’s life, womanhood found a different path like a militant,

vigilant, involving in personal and political beliefs and actions, sometimes a strong

and forceful and self-assured of doing anything. These characteristics of

disproportionate from the real ideologies of conventional motherhood changed their

habits and habitual actions too. Margaret Watters mentioned that,

“In 1848, Elizabeth Cady and Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized a women’s

convention in Seneca Falls, New York, USA, since they were denied along with other

women to attend the world convention on slavery, which was attended by Americans

in London. As a pro-world convention, they two organized this and it was successful”

(33).

They campaigned for rights, including the vote, for woman and for the African

Americans. While coming to writing of nineteenth century women of France, Sonya

Stephens has an opinion that “the social changes that mark the nineteenth century and

led to the increasing dominance of the bourgeoisie and the growing literary and

leverage of the working classes that inevitably affected the position of women.

Moreover, the increasing power of the press, the proliferation of newspapers and

periodicals had been introduced in the 1830s. And, the surge in the members of

printed books and pamphlets gave women a much broader audience and a much wider

array of venues through which their views were made known” (Sonya Stephens 122).

So, it is eventually learnt that, the literature of France is very much forwarded

comparing to other literature in which women are part of it, and has depicted

women’s writing and views through journals and other print media. Rather, in

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American literature, it is less and except Emily Dickinson no other woman writer has

attained popularity among other women writers of 19th century.

In Sarah Piatt’s poems, there were no such signs and references to women’s

suffrage movement which was the very basis for the feminist ideologies of the later

part of 19th century American Women Movement, and its continuation. She had been

in and out of a voyage in her thought and expression freely. Firstly, the psychic

distress due to the loss of her children at their childhood age caused much pain.

Secondly, she was in depression caused by travel and staying with her husband due to

changes in the course of his work. As a conventional, normal wife she meted out the

happenings of social interventions by responding to it. Thirdly, since there was no

mentioning of Sarah Piatt’s working status, she might have probably been free and in

isolation too in the absence of her husband. Losing her three children at a continual

gap had pushed her tendency to be focused simply on the sociological and

psychological approach to get writing as the archetypal images of ‘motherhood’,

beloved’ and ‘wife’ which are the three transitions of a normal, conventional

Victorian woman of her era. Her conventional roles of being a woman had not

restricted from her usual doings.

In this chapter, the study is based on Sarah Piatt’s treatment of transition from

one stage to another, from each important role of a woman; such as, beloved, wife and

mother / motherhood. As part of recovering the last voices of nineteenth century

women writers’ role in making of an American sense, Sarah Piatt’s careful and

courageous portrayal of the contemporary conventional era is also unveiled. This

study on Motherhood, wife and beloved could serve as a tool to enrich in bringing out

the role of her writing despite the ‘silenced-voice’ due to reasons like politics, ethnic

and gender issues of 19th century America.

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It is to be ascertained whether only the male writers touched and emphasized

the universal themes or the women writers were simply unconcerned about the social

issues like nationalism, war, civil war, slavery and other relevant sufferings of the 19th

century common people. Despite the powerful reasons to keep away Sarah Piatt and

be hidden for a long time, in the array of most notable 19th century American

Literature, now she is being given a unique, notable and a significant place along with

19th century social writers. She has claimed this place by her realistic approach and

interventions to bring out the issues with aesthetically rich and conventionally never

over bound.

In the introductory part of “The Palace Burner”, P.B. Bennett declared that,

‘because of the extraordinary circumstances of her life, and the long span of time over

which her poems appeared, Sarah Piatt was able to reflect in her poetry the principal

social, national and artistic concerns of over fifty years of American women’s poetry’

(2001, xxvii). Among the most notable stages of Sarah Piatt’s career as a poetess,

being a mother was considered as most gifted one. Also, the motherhood had served

much to her weariness’ exposure in her writing for which she had used to write habit

as an out-let to most of her feelings. Sarah Piatt’s first and only daughter among other

six children was born in 1862 and thereby her motherhood began. Later in 1864, she

had stayed with her husband John James Piatt, in a country house of Georgetown

Heights, outside of Washington town.

During her stay in Georgetown Heights, Sarah Piatt had given birth to her first

son Victor in 1864. During the heady years, it is learnt that Sarah Piatt had obtained

impression from the acquaintances of her husband and other well-known writers like

his contemporaries namely Howells, James Russell Lowell, the editor of the Atlantic,

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William D.O’ Connor, Walt Whitman, E.C. Stedman,

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and Richard H. Stoddard. As the indirect impression of famous writing of the authors,

including her husband’s, with an amalgamation of motherhood her career in writing

was enriched. From the writing of Sarah Piatt it is noted that she was entirely different

and distinguished from other female writers and their subjects of writing. She had

been the epitome of her contemporary social events’ exact projection through her

writing. That was the reason why Sarah Piatt’s critics could not align her writing with

feminists or feminism oriented themes.

Principally saying, she was more than her feminine disclosures. She was a

social realist through her portrayal of universal themes. She was not rather like a frog

in the well to watch the place and to speak about only its four walls’ echoes. She had

been an extended thinker in the sea of social events developing in America, and had

voyaged in analyzing the social events from the crux of the events’ outburst as

denoted and predicted in her well known pieces of writing like “The Palace Burner,”

“Beatrice Cenci” etc. In both the poems, the mother-child paradigm was vitally played

as an archetypal image to predict social events as an instructive means. The mode of

expression eventually may also be seen as an invocation to draw the attention of

future daughters with her instructions.

This discussion centers primarily on Sarah Piatt’s experiences of marriage and

motherhood with ample examples and expressions depicted in her poems. The poem,

“Her Snowdrops” is written in the third person narration on motherhood, which

reveals an instruction to love or prediction of love and fondness of a mother towards

her child. The setting of this poem is a lovely home with a fireplace inside. The

beginning of the poem sets the situation of a winter evening, and before the sleeping

hours. The mother had a strong and unshakable faith in the immortality of the soul

and its beauty. The narrator of the poem expressed the view on the beauty of the

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listener / reader as comparatively less beautiful than the child’s beauty. That could be

the sufficient means in accepting the density on the keen portrayal of the beauty of a

child while the listener would be a little more mature than that of child’s. The speaker

of the poem would show the identity of a loving and caring mother figure on its tone

and density in beautifying the fairness of a child with the comparative sense as

expressed in the following lines;

The woman who sits in the firelight here,

Kissing her child to its lovely sleep,

Has the faith of a soul more tender and clear,

In its higher beauty, than yours, to keep. (PB Bennett 17).

As the imaginary line was around the middle of the Earth at an equal distance from

the North Pole and the South, the shadowy dreams were united by a chain of Gold,

made radiant wings (parts) in the palms (of the child). And the rustling sound echoes

around her presence as a sad undertone;

Sometimes she is sad at a rustling sound –

Like radiant wings in the palms, it seems;

She can feel the shining Equator wound,

Like a chain of gold, through her shadowy dreams. (17)

The comparative, metaphoric representations like, ‘chain of gold’, with ‘shadowy

dreams’ , ‘wings in the palms’ with ‘shining Equator (unseen)’ diminish the visibility

and moving beyond the three unities i.e., time, place, and action as found in the plays.

Because, the poem was begun with reference to the winter season (“the woman who

sits in the firelight here”) and in the fifth stanza bearing reference to ‘spring’ (wood)

moving in ‘time’ of the season, The beauty of the poem lies in the making of stanza

division. Because, when the first or the previous stanza seems to be the words of the

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mother and the following would be the reference to the beauty / beautifying words of

the child and the final stanza recalls the bygone days of the past and the beauty of

adoring the lost love of her beloved lover:-

And sometimes yet, from the dewy air,

Of that blossoming morning of long ago,

He puts these cold, white buds in her hair,

And says: ‘They will melt in its sunny glow; (17)

This poem could serve the quest of Sarah’s multi-dimensional personalities’

projection, such as, the love of mother, child’s beauty, fictional aestheticism,

conventional religious dogmas, dramatic realism and other aspects with elite

employment of metaphor and similes in much. Sarah Piatt’s two dimensional roles or

the dual role is seen in ‘The Funeral of a Doll’. She has shown evidences of

perfection for understanding the motherhood. And, love from her exact predictions of

both the child for the loss of a doll (‘blue-eyed and sweet; she always smiled’) and of

a mother who grieved for losing the happiness over the death of doll (a child of Sarah

herself) are expressed. As a little girl grieved over the death / loss of a doll, this

motherly speaker has also shaken the hearts by her complete expression of her

personal disposition for the loss of a child. It was almost like a ‘cold’ and pitiable

conversation between a mother and her child.

The uses of phrases like ‘Little Nell’ and ‘blue-eyed’ are used with some

special emphasis rather than to be for their actual and lexical meaning. While, coming

to examine the literal connectivity to the phrases, Bennett has included that the

reference of ‘Little Nell’, as the highly sentimentalized heroine of Charles’ Dickens

‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ (1841) (PB Bennett 166). The ‘blue-eyed’ reference brings

the meaning for its usage of metaphor since it needs the attention of all the eyes for its

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reference. The phrase ‘blue-eyed’, literally brings meaning as ‘the attention seeking’

one. The ‘Blue-eyed’ means, that one would be better than anyone else and who

would therefore receive better treatment than others. When going into the subject, a

child could speak by counting or collecting words to express his/her needs for the

requirements to be governed. It would rarely be possible for a child to express such a

huge phrase like ‘It was a funeral, mamma. Oh, Poor Little Nell is dead, is dead’ (32).

Rather, that could be possible to the speaker (Sarah herself) to speak on as being

alternately in the place of a child who grieves childishly for the loss of a child, the

doll, to mamma. The recollection of past activities of the child, made her grieve for

that moment with the dense feeling of loss:

How dark! --- and do you hear it blow?

She is afraid. “And, as she said

These sobbing words, she laid her head

Between her hands and whispered: “Here

Her bed is made, the precious dear

She cannot sleep in it. I knew

And there is no one left to wear

Her pretty clothes. Where did she go?

See, this poor ribbon tied her hair! (SMB Piatt 107)

The female child left the mother homesick, by leaving her pretty clothes, and ribbon

to be worn by another female child. It might have some semi-autobiographical note,

because, to the speaker (if Sarah Piatt) of this poem, she was blessed with only one

female child among the other six male children. To be very specific, it was Sarah’s

first and only daughter, namely Marian, who was born in 1862 (xxv) and whom she

lost. As, every poet has his or her own poetic license to conduct an experiment in a

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variety of forms to project aesthetic beauty and achievement in fulfilling the meaning

of writing, Sarah’s selection of form with four stanzas consists of eleven lines in each;

and, finds its own merit in form and content to articulate the mood of the poems in

line with the mothering and its bondage with grief and contentment of the child.

Poems of Sarah Piatt, especially on or about children, would normally begin as

conversations between the mother and the child, or with her usual style of using

Poly-voices. Most of Sarah’s poems were used to project the nineteenth century

bourgeois’ emotion. In this array, the poems written as being a mother, for expressing

the motherhood were more outstanding than the other writers.

The suffering of women like losing children, and husbands as well would lead

them to become bait for financial consequences, which would sometimes induce them

losing their conventional life at the cost of poverty (P.B. Bennett, 2003 6). As a Social

Realist, Sarah Piatt’s each verse on events turned as a mirror on the social matters

specifically domestic affairs during the contemporary period. This is portrayed

through the events like in company with children at home, walking on the street,

roadside pavement, garden etc., Sarah Piatt has dealt with some of the 19th century

social happenings. Children’s activities, and indeed are the media to communicate for

what she would like to express to the readers and, society through her poems. In many

of her poems, the style, like use of poly-voices could have been a component for

expressing the events at her maximum risk. Despite the reason of ‘finding very

difficult’ to bring the exact meaning out of her poems in relation to social events, her

poems instill interest and paved way for the accomplishment of intellectual quest.

Among numerous poems written on motherhood, the poem entitled ‘My Babes in The

Wood’ (S. M. B. Piatt 1894 127), has sought the attention for its different setting.

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At the primary level of teaching, children would be given text books of stories

with painted pictures of related characters to make it comprehensible. One such event

is considered for a comparative view in Sarah Piatt’s poems “My Babes in the Wood”

(H41: 246:825 Nov. 1870, Harper’s Monthly Magazine)}. By drawing the attention

for learning such events better than what one could get it from old stories, Sarah Piatt

has proven her artistic intelligence from her enthusiastic beginning as;

I know a story, fairer, dimmer, sadder,

Than any story painted in your books

You are so glad? It will not make you gladder,

Yet listen, with your pretty restless looks. (SMB Piatt 127)

Mary Wearn denotes that,

Until the fag end of the twentieth century, Sarah Piatt was not much read as a

writer of the American Poetry. And, it was the event of the non-American

readers too. Sarah Piatt seems to be not given much importance to her writing

on some ground reasons and issues like, gender, theme, social background of

the dominating West-American writers etc. She was considered as very

‘feminine’ in her writing, whose works reflected the ‘joy, grief, and

aspirations of the ordinary woman’s life, with the consciously relied Victorian

sensibility (2006 75).

But, it was studied in later stage that, more than a common woman of Victorian

sensibility of 19th century’s conventional roles, Sarah Piatt had also projected the

social events dealing with the rebellious nature of woman against social injustices.

This was clearly evident in her poems like ‘The Palace Burner’ and ‘Beatrice Cenci’.

Piatt had given reasons from contemporary social events and from the past too having

a cross reference of examples in time.

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Especially, in ‘The Palace Burner’ the beauty of the poem lies in the

conversation between mother and child talking about the social events written in

question and answer style and a lesson from the study of the past. Sarah Piatt had

played a compatible role than a normal mother. Despite some critics’ view about her

poems, she was domestic by serving her family by nurturing the children, providing

them morally right things and being loyal to her husband. She was pious for the

dogmas of her paternal religion. There were some hindrances like social changes;

unexpected events took place in her married life, and also subsequent changes in

working places of her husband. These dominantly affected her psychological

exposure in most of her poems by having a pendulum like swaying thoughts between

the faith and fact. This influenced her to be discouraged and question faith and god.

While writing about motherhood, P.B. Bennett had mentioned in her Preface

to ‘The Palace Burner’ that "Sarah Piatt had written much provocatively on the

subjects of motherhood and children, more and better than any other contemporary

writers of the 19th century could do" (2001, xviv). There could be reasons of social

happening in America to transit Sarah’s original nature of being conservative and a

sentimental Victorian woman, for selecting the themes of ‘The Palace Burner’ and

‘Beatrice Cenci’, bravely. The force and power with which she dealt this could be

discovered from these poems. In ‘Beatrice Cenci’ the poet allowed the speaker of the

poem with a murderous touch to justify the murder of her (Beatrice Cenci’s) own

father. The father had imprisoned Cenci's mother and brother due to his crooked mind

because he liked to maintain his illegal courtship with another woman (71).

The importance of correlating and cross referencing phases of her writing with

dramatic form has shed much light on the study to understand the aim in projecting

such themes, convincing the society and adorned with fair touches and lovely

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expressions of fondness and love of children (of Sarah Piatt). It had also enriched the

ambition and duty of a mother and it enhanced the difference in perspectives and

introduced a worth of Sarah Piatt among the common and gender based writers of her

own era. Principally, for a critical perseverance, Sarah Piatt seemed to be juxtaposed

for using ‘child’ phrases in writing to take effort and succeed in her attempts to

project a ‘mother – children’ conversation. It was more than a common, personal

motherly expression rather as a Universal mother to all the children socially. These

were highly philosophical and much matured than one could expect and imagine

about a child’s exposure. She attempted to project the emotions through the questions

of children. It is evident in the following stanzas from both ‘The Palace Burner’ and

‘Beatrice Cenci.’ Lines from ‘The Palace Burner’ the following two stanzas could

reveal child’s voice;

Has she a charm so calm that is could breathe

In damp, low places till some frightened hour;

Then start, like a fair, subtle snake, and wreathe

A stinging poison with a shadow power?

Would I burn places? The child has seen

In this fierce creature of the Commune here

So bright with bitterness and so serene,

A being finer than my soul, I fear (SMB Piatt 121-22)

And, in ‘Beatrice Cenci’ the stanza goes as:-

Hush! For a child’s quick murmur breaks the charm

Of terror that was winding round me so;

And, at the white touch of her pretty, arm,

Darkness and Death and Agony crouch low

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The natural behavior of a mother to make the child be quiet at the time of seriousness

shows the situation odd to the child. Yet,

The child’s mature question flows here as;

“In old-time dungeons: “Tell me, (is it harm

To ask you?) is the picture real, though?-

And why the beautiful ladies, all, you know,

Live so far off, and die so long ago? (72)

Sarah Piatt was oriented with an expression of close intimation with emotional

bondage with domestic gothic. P.B Bennett related her view of the domestic Gothic

with the expression of Sarah Piatt’s personal identification (2003 11). The Guido

Reni’s famous portrait of Beatrice Cenci was found in a shop window. A question

was raised by the child. Thereby she continued her portrayal of domestic events. The

portrayal of family events took public view when coming to social-eyes of

contemporary social-gothic and horror as found in the case of ‘Beatrice Cenci’;

Is it some Actress?” a slight school-boy said.

Some Actress? Yes.

------ The curtain rolled away,

Dusty and dim. The scene – among the dead---

In some weird, gloomy-pillared palace lay;

The Tragedy, which we have brokenly read,

With its two hundred ghastly years was grey:

None dared applaud with flowers her shadowy way—

Yet, ah! How bitterly well she seemed to play! (1984,72)

It is discussed that the dramatic setting of this poem which enriches the subject matter

and its way out through dialogue between mother and her child. And the speaker’s

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child’s (the school girl / boy’s) sudden murmuring brought the speaker’s

consciousness to the reality. Before that, the child questions that made her to be in a

state of recalling the domestic gothic and horror of Beatrice Cenci, who had murdered

her father with the help of her brother and with her close-inmate, possibly her lover.

The recalled situation might give clues to the state of mind of the speaker from the

following;

Hush! For a Child’s murmur breaks the charm

Of terror that was winding round me so;

And, at the white touch of her pretty arm,

Darkness and Death and Agony crouch low (72).

Somehow it seems impossible to keep Sarah Piatt’s motherhood poems only as an

expression of the motherly love utmost. She plays both as the mother of

consciousness over the social happenings and for its moral predictions out of social-

horror and gothic incidents of both in society and at home. As a teacher teaches

disciples about the moral and how a moralistic approach could be imported on such

events to know the exact truth and the source of the events’ horrors it could be visibly

known from her pictorial portrayal of images of Sarah Piatt’s speakers (mother’s,

possibly Sarah Piatt herself). That shows that, mothers have been the responsible

figures of motherhood and the motherly instructors of social events to her children.

Any loss of dearly reared children would bring a mother to be utterly shattered

and be broken hearted. ‘We Two’ opens the gates of emotional outburst to feel the

deeply rooted pain of heart in its last room. Everyone, including the story could be

changed by Sarah’s speaker and mother. This poem also shows the strong furies

against God’s will which failed to prevent from her agony of losing her two children.

In many of her poems Sarah used religious allusion to expose her inherent, deeply

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rooted feeling of sadness at most. The other side of God’s will from the pleasant and

gracious mood has been given in this poem, and it is compared against the broken

heart due to the death of her two children.

As Bennett (2003), revealed about Sarah’s complaint, “Piatt came closer to

Dickinsonian apostasy in this poem, complaining at the top of her lungs against a

universe arranged for the narcissistic self-aggrandizement (which means ‘the act or

practice of enhancing or exaggerating one's own importance, power, or reputation’) of

an uncaring god.” The opening of the poem leads to show the two different sides of

God:

God’s will is—the bud of rose for your hair,

The ring for your hand and the pearly for your

God’s will is – the mirror that makes you look fair

No wonder you whisper: ‘God’s will is the best. (88-89).

After giving usual qualities to Godliness with the phrases like ‘Bud of the rose to

hear”/ ‘ring to hand’/ ‘Pearly to breast’/, ‘mirror makes fair’/ and, ‘the best’ is God’s

will, a sudden terminal change by using a conjunction ‘But’ with the negative ‘turn’,

she expressed her strong denial of all such best qualities of the will of God. She did so

by using her angriest phrases from the continuation of the first stanza;

But what if God’s will were the famine, the flood?—

And were God’s will the coffin shut down in your fact?—

And were God’s will the worm in the fold of the bud

Instead of the picture, the light, and the lace? (85).

God’s will from, ‘the bud of rose’ – became ‘famine and flood’, ‘Ring of hand’ and

‘pearly to breast’ became, ‘coffin shut down fact’. Also, ‘the bud of rose’ turns as ‘the

worm in the fold of the bud’. With the smoothing expressions, God’s will was

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defined, later in the third stanza. Yet, Piatt described the will of God to a harder sense

as follows;

Were god’s will the arrow that flieth by night,

Were god’s will the pestilence walking by day,

The clod in the valley, the rock on the height—

I fancy ‘God’s will’ would be harder to say (88).

The realization of one’s own will power would depend on one’s own attitude.

The literally expressed feeling of keeping a child of mother exhibits the aesthetic

pleasure by sustaining;

God’s will is – your own will. What honour have you

For having your own will, awake or asleep?

Who praises the lily for keeping the dew,

When the dew is so sweet for the lily to keep?

Even the unconcern of the lily’s artistic quality of mother’s caring a child in her, as

lily bears ‘dew’ on it. It explains the emotion of happiness and un-praised beauty of

Nature. At her final phase while expressing her belief in the will of God ‘She let her

thoughts a swaying between ‘Harder” and ‘Divine”. She was helpless when shedding

‘desolate tears’ by the loss of her children. According to God's will she understood

that man was created from dust and to dust he would return when he dies. She

ironically laments that God's will is 'divine' when she would die and return to dust.

She also satirically calls that she has to subject to God's will, when she dies, she

would hear God's approval that, ‘He is well pleased.’ Her anger towards death and the

events of life makes her ask the same age old question of death;

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God’s will unto me is not music or wine,

With helpless reproaching, with desolate tears,

God’s will I resist, for God’s will is divine;

And I – shall be dust to the end of my years.

God’s will is not mine. Yet one night I shall be

Very still at his feet, where the stars may not shine,

“Lo! I am well pleased,” I shall hear from the sky;

Because – it is God’s will I do, and not mine. (89).

According to Bennett (2001), “We Two” is the one, among Piatt’s angriest poems.

“We Two” reflects her rage at having lost two children within a single year the

unnamed baby in 1893 and Victor, who died on Fourth of July accident in 1874. This

poem’s imagery draws from the Bible. Especially, it speaks about why man has to

suffer and whether God helps a man who suffers or he punishes him. It’s a beautiful

Biblical allusion with reference to Psalm 91:5.6 and Job 21:33 in Bible. Sarah

identifies her speaker of this poem with Job as much as with Christ!” (168).

This poem was published in the ‘Independent” in September 1874. Bennett

(2003 241) says that “It appeared to be a serious poem, most explicitly elegiac, in

which Piatt responded to the deaths of her children: an unnamed infant in 1873, and

her oldest son, Victor who would probably be the boy mentioned in ‘The Palace

Burner’ — in July, 1849. Through the following poems entitled, ‘A Butterfly’s

Message”, ‘The Favourite Child”, ‘Answering a Child’, ‘Comfort--by the Coffin’, and

‘Sad Wisdom – Four years Old’ she expresses the gamut of emotions which one

might expect from a woman who had lost two children within a single year and whose

religious faith is not strong enough to handle the pursuant crisis ” (2003 241).

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There are some poems which would provide glimpses to see mother-speakers

with a different and varied nature than what one would actually imagine and expect.

To be expressive of her thoughts and feelings Sarah Piatt has left some notable

remarks in her writing through the words and phrases, especially in the form of

‘Dramatic Realism’ to know the other side of the women or the mother speakers of

her poems. For example, in this poem entitled, ‘Questions of the Hour’, the chief

characteristics of Sarah Piatt are found in most of the key components of Piatt’s

emerging poetics of dramatic realism, such as, the use of words actually heard and

spoken in conversation, personal identification in experience, building the poems in

dramatic situations, says PB Bennett, (164 8). Sarah Piatt’s mother, speaker or Sarah

herself needs to fulfill the expectations of her children. That could also be seen and

justified from these poetic lines, principally expressed by her child after a careful

listening to the story of Cinderella, on bedtime;

Read Cinderella just once more----I know

What makes----men’s other wives—so mean?”

That I was tired, it may be cross, before

I shut the painted book for her to go.

Hours later, from a child’s white bed

I heard the timid, last queer question start:

“Mamma, are you---my stepmother?” it said.

The innocent reproof crept to my heart. (2001 10-11)

Would there be such a woman in the 19th century contemporary era of Sarah

Piatt, as the step-motherly acting like of Cinderella’s with evil characteristic and ill

treating nature towards the innocent soul like Cinderella’s? If not, what could have

been the reason for that child of the poem to raise a question towards her own mother?

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It could be possible. Because, unless there would be a situational and attitudinal

impact in children, such questions would not be raised if the child has spoken out

rarely with the lack of sub-consciousness’ inducement over the related situations such

as the one the child came across by listening to the story of Cinderella’s suffering out

of her step-mother’s ill treatment. On the other hand, that question could be of Sarah

Piatt’s mother-speaker for the sake of rising to accomplish and to get the attention or

the awareness of such situations. It is done with a universal thought of expectation (of

a writer) to be justified with moral approach. Meanwhile, on both the sides, Sarah

Piatt’s experience of throwing some light on such social events could merely be

acknowledged for her poetic skill in dramatizing the social realism of her living

period.

Sarah Piatt’s speakers on motherhood spare their selfless identification being

deviated from the basic qualities such as to be ‘shut up’ in homes rather to express

individual aspirations in relation to social and political aspects. Most of her poems are

means of expressing the subjectivity of the middle-class, working-class women’s

domestic and pious nature too. On the contrary, in some poems like “Angel in the

House”, Sarah has tried to break the concept of woman as an angel which has been

the belief of the 19th century.

Maturity comes from experiencing the life. The immaturity ends in childhood

age. Before the experience begins if the child dies, how a mother could feel and what

would be the wish of that mother of the dead child? This has become the subject of

discussion in “Child’s Faith”. In this poem, the mother or the speaker described the

nature of her child who died, which caused much pain to her. It was like in her genteel

style of dramatic realism, she ended up with the situational dialogue between mother

and child. “Sarah Piatt was wearily sad, due to the loss of her children by the years

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1873, 1874, and 1884” (PB Bennett xxiii). The childhood stages could also be

considered as needed to correlate for identifying whether Sarah’s son’s loss has

aroused her feelings expressed in this poem. This poem was first published in the year

1877 (Smo 14:2:247, Je 1877). Probably, this could be written about the loss of her

second male-child, whom she lost in the year 1874, prior to the publication of this

poem. The de-personalized thoughts of the mother in this poem have given the clues

to understand the speaker’s faith in the ‘divinity of life’ and ‘non-belief in death’,

which are found in these following lines:-

--- come here, I say, little child of mine,

Come with your bloom and breath

(If he should believe in the life divine,

I will not believe in death!) (SMB Piatt160)

And, through her own child’s voice she could have spoken as a conversation between

the son and herself as;

Where is your brother?”---- I question low,

And wait for his wise reply.

Does he say, “Down there in the grave?’ Ah, no;

He says, with a laugh, “In the sky! (160).

In Paula Bennett’s words, it is said that, “Piatt’s awareness of the less-than-cherubic

nature of her children is strikingly evident not just in the poems that represent them

alive, but, even more noteworthy, in the poems presenting them as dead” (2001 xlvi –

xlvii). Piatt’s voice through the mother of children seems to be very tender, playful

and funny sometimes. The tender nature of mother's love is expressed in this poem

with greater expectation that, her son should be in heaven (“In the Sky!”) rather to be

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in grave (“Down there in the grave?”). The usage of children in dialogue to express

her ‘wish’ and ‘nature of being’ are Piatt’s marveling tactics of poetic art.

Sarah Piatt’s mother speakers are having the inherent qualities of motherhood

and also the qualities of socially impacted aspects. Sarah Piatt’s speakers are socially

responsible women rather than to be only mothers of filial love. The role of mother-

speakers of Sarah has played an active part in expressing the tender love of

motherhood. The loss of Sarah’s own children has shaken her faith in religion and

godliness. The traumatic impact of losses has affected her in various ways like,

psychologically and theologically. In “Her Blindness in Grief” the mother's pain of

losing her first child has been pictured in a length of fifty four lines divided into nine

sestets. This might be impregnated with autobiographical elements of all her agony

and pain. She has a feeling as if her soul was detached in the form her child’s death.

She describes it as;

What if my soul is left to me?

Oh! Sweeter than my soul was he.

Its breast broods on a coffin lid;

Its empty eyes stare at the dust.

Tears follow tears, for treasure hid

Forevermore from moth and rust:

Also, her faith in God and Godliness has got shaken out of the unexpected loss of her

dearly loved child;

The sky a shadow; how much

I long for something I can touch!

God is silence: Could I hear

Him whisper once, “Poor child,” to me!

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God is a dream, a hope, a fear,

A vision – that the seraphs see.

The faith is shaken due to her inability to feel the tangible presence of God, whom she

could see, touch and speak physically. She could not trust in an invisible, eternal God

whom only seraphs could see and God is a dream to her. According to Bennett,

“Sarah Piatt’s loss and grief over the death of her child, J.J. Piatt, her husband, in a

letter to Stedman (August 20, 1873) described the death of Sarah’s four day-old infant

from unknown cause. It was her first such loss and she was inconsolable” (2001 168).

The feelings over the death of her child had directly affected and the outcome of it has

got projected in her writing.

She drew the allusion from the resurrection of Son of God, after his death.

According to the Bible, it’s not her mother Mary but Mary Magdalene who was

consoled by Him, “Why weepest thou?” Sarah used the allusion as if the mother was

consoled and the consoling question would be a mocking question to her.

Woman, why weepest thou?” One said,

To His own mother, from the dead.

If He should come to mock me now,

Here in my utter loneliness,

And say to me, “Why weepest thou?”

I wonder would I weep the less. (PB Bennett 49)

The final stage of grief out of her child’s loss was said in the following stanza;

Oh! But to kiss his little feet,

And say to them, “So sweet, so sweet,”

I would give up whatever pain

(What else is there to give, I say?)

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This wide world holds. Again, again,

I yearn to follow his away. (I51, 7th Sestet)

In speaking about Sarah Piatt’s maternal poetry it is indeed to recognize the quote of

Wearn Mary McCartin who says that “…. The poet’s (Sarah Piatt’s) specific

preoccupation with the maternal has not been adequately articulated, due largely to

the exigencies of recovery” (2006, 35). She also said that, “…Bennett’s (PB Bennett)

recovery strategies have now successfully positioned Piatt in the heart of nineteenth-

century poetry studies, it is time to recalibrate our evaluation of the poet and to

acknowledge that Piatt’s extensive body of work on motherhood is every bit as

challenging and political as like her poems about the Civil War” (35).

In this discussion, the poem “Her Blindness in Grief” induces to raise

questions about Sarah’s faith on God, religion and mercy of God. Because, she

resented God for taking her child away and used phrases like ‘God is a dream, a hope,

a fear / a vision—That the seraphs see’ (II sestet). In “A Child in the Park” (subtitled

as ‘St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and July, 1890)’ she had shown that feel in fourth

and fifth stanzas:

Silk tassels blew from Indian corn

Where he was born.

The Atlantic fireflies led him through

The dust and dew.

The slave’s light songs had left the South;

But that young mouth

Mocked them, till his dark muse would weep

Herself to sleep. (PB Bennett 136-137).

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PB Bennett denotes as “Sarah might have left the last impression and marking about

her musing Maid, an African lady (179).” She was living in Ireland (the country had

long lasting war with England over its own land on political and religious matter).

Sarah Piatt has realized that they would not extend their stay in that country anymore.

Rather, she indicated that the time has come for them to leave to their motherland,

Southern America from the following lines;

My child, the world is sweet; but oh,

We too must go-

We are not of it, Golden-head!

We both are dead.

And, on the other side, speaking about the morality of life from the physical world,

these poetic lines are provided as sense of Pun.

In the poem entitled ‘The Witch in the Glass’ Piatt’s speaker has played both

the roles of child and mother. The opening of this short poem comes as the child’s

opinion of explaining what her mother said to her. She wants to stand in front of the

mirror which would reflect her to have self admiration. Because, in the second stanza

as the speaker her mother has responded as something would happen in the form of a

boy who may offer her a rose as the symbol of love – which she should not go

through according to the mother.

The first stanza beautifies with imageries like ‘the mirror’, ‘the witch’ and ‘red

– red mouth’ which could be taken as not existing possibility in the physical world,

rather it would be possible in a dream and in fairy tales or in the utopian world. The

imagery ‘red red meat’ could be seen with the literal meaning of it to equate to and

correlate with the sense of expression of the mother in the second stanza in terms of

‘love’ through the ‘rose’ offered by a boy as a token of his love-proposal. The normal

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offering of it has disturbed her mother’s (speaker’s) life by the experience. Moreover,

that could be the reason why the speaker does not want her daughter to be caught by

such chance at her own conscious eyes. She reflects it in the following lines;

My mother says I must not pass

Too near that glass;

She is afraid that I will see

A little witch that looks like me,

With a red, red mouth, to whisper low

The very thing I should not know!”

A lack for your entire mother’s care!

A bird of the air,

A wistful mind, or (I suppose

Sent by some hapless boy) a rose,

With breath too sweet, will whisper low,

The very thing you should not know! (104)

The child who would reach the prime youth might be a reason of her mother’s denial

or fear to allow her child to be in front of the mirror. And mother’s aspiration’s

shadow was revealed there as, who would be that unlucky boy who could offer rose,

as symbol of love. The mother has worried that, even the rose would be offered by a

hapless boy, the rose would be sweet and its fragrance would be sweeter – which

would bring that boy’s low whispered phrases of love-proposal. She has to be

conscious not to let such incidents happen to her daughter. How long a bloomed

flower could be veiled with a shadow, and her daughter from looking in the mirror?

Rather that would be unveiled to the eyes of sun and light of it to admire. The

expected changes have happened through such a hapless boy.

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This poem reveals that how the love of a mother gets another form of

protecting her child from the eyes of any person without the knowledge and

acknowledgment of the mother. This sense of concern and consciousness shows that

accuracy of the conventional and culturally bracketed life of the middle class woman

of Victorian sense. Here, the speaker, the mother plays the role as it could have been

in most of her poems, as the preserver of nineteenth-century conventional practices of

social norms, being a mother of bourgeois, and the working-class. In relation to this

sense, Piatt, in her ‘If I Had made the world’ lets the mother speaker’s responses to

her child’s questions about what she could have done if she were God, the creator of

the world. The mother’s efforts in getting the child’s concentration to her caring

explanation were visibly complex while it is seemed like the child tries to pronounce

the word ‘Shakespeare’. The mother spelt the name ‘Shakespeare’ whom she has

wanted to create if she were God, the creator. This subject of the poem is revealed in

this child-mother conversation;

I would have made one Poet too---

Has God made more? --- Yes, I forgot,

There is no need of asking you;

You know as little as I do

A poet is ---well, who knows what?

And yet a poet is, my dear

A man who writes a book like this,

(There never was but one, I hear ;)

-----Yes, it is hard to spell S-h-a-k-e-s-p-e-a-r-e.

So, now, Good-night, --- and here’s a kiss. (PB Bennett 104)

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The conversation about child sometimes seems to leave chances to examine the

mother’s status too. And, in some places the funny questions of child would get some

philosophical responses from her mother; such as in ‘The Palace Burner’:-

Would I? Go your play. Would I, indeed?

I? Does the boy not know my soul to be!

Languid and worldly, with a dainty need

For light and music? Yet he questions me. (SMB Piatt 120)

The funny sense of questioning towards mother gets philosophical responses such as

the following:-

Oh Mother, look-We all are gone,

Our house is swimming in the sea.

It will not stop. It keeps right on.

How far away love all must be!

The wind has blown it from the Clift.

It rocks us like a skiff.

The author’s belief in matters of after death is expressed as;

We all will drown but Baby. He

Is in his pretty grave so far.

He has to sleep till judgment. We

Must sink where all the sailors are,

Who used to die, when storms would come,

Away off from their home. (SMB Piatt 5-6)

The first stanza comes as the words spoken by the child about the danger in flood that

seized their home. Out of fear of drowning in the water the child tried to get her

mother’s attention for help. In responding to that situation, the mother had revealed

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the nature as something critical through her philosophical expression in the second

stanza. The mother’s moral support was expressed in her words.

Being in such a close and loving ‘nearness’ with the children, Piatt out of

fondness, has been forced to question God. After the death of her dearly loved child,

in the poem entitled ‘No Help’, she is forced to question God and His love. If He is a

father to me, why should He allow me to go through this agony? She meditates where

her son could be, and if he is with her father in Heaven, then why she is excluded

from her father. She wishes that she would join him in death and that is the only

bridge connecting heaven and the dust of earth. She questions the very faith in the

following lines from the third stanza;

Is he not with his Father? So I trust.

Is he not His? Was he not also mine?

His mother’s empty arms yearn toward the dust.

Heaven lies too high, the soul is too divine.

I wake at night and miss him from my breast,

And – human words can never say the rest. (PB Bennett 84)

Thus, the fondness towards the children and faithfulness towards God’s will is

portrayed and the speaker is found to be deserted while the frequent deaths have

washed away her children with continual gap. That absolutely made her sways

between the Faith and fear of loss.

The following quote by Mary McCartain, would be fit to get the phrases of her

for the dealing of Motherhood in Sarah Piatt’s poems. Warren, Mary McCartain

(2006) said in her subjection and subversion in Sarah Piatt’s maternal Poetics, that

“In fact, Piatt recognized the political and cultural currency of the maternal,

finding in motherhood the significant juncture of women’s private and public lives.

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Beginning in post revolutionary America and coming to fruition in the mid-nineteenth

century, the role of the ‘Republican Mother’ as Lind K. Kerber aptly names it,

become virtually the only authentic means for American women to enact their

citizenship. Keenly aware of the de facto political nature of motherhood, Piatt uses

maternity as the fulcrum of her cultural critique. Resisting society’s conservative,

sentimental, constructions, Sarah Piatt initiates an alternative discourse of motherhood

that explores the maternal role as a potential site of both subjection and subversion”

(2006, 77).

The Voice of ‘Woman’

‘The Palace Burner’ and the ‘Beatrice Cenci’ are the poems on political

themes which reveal the themes apart from the stemming in essential qualities of

womanhood and motherhood. Sarah Piatt, being a sentimental maternal figure, who

had deeply rooted in the belief of nineteenth century American cultural de facto

(which means ‘concerning fact) and conventional aspects of religion, used (her)

children’s voice for the social events, (which were haunting the contemporary

political events and strategies). Motherhood in her poems is seen as the prominent,

women’s moral authority and cultural prestige which are significant. The ‘Double

Quatrains’ is ten in number. Each double-quatrain carries different themes. The final

one entitled ‘For Another’s sake’ carries the wonder of motherhood. No other poems

of Sarah Piatt would serve with much greatness of motherhood, than this one.

Especially, the last couple of lines in the second stanza would get an even anyone’s

heart to be empathetic towards the discomfort and the agony of the mother, who lost

her child. It also includes the grief of (the speaker) Sarah Piatt for being unavailable to

comfort that mother for her loss of child in the infancy stage itself. The feelings of

'fellow mother' are given in the following stanzas;

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“Sweet, sweet? My child, some sweeter word than sweet,

Some lovelier word than love, I want for you.

Who says the world is bitter, while your feet

Are left among the lilies and the dew?

…Ah? So some other has, this night, to fold

Such hands as his, and drop some precious head

From off her breast as full of baby-gold?

I, for her grief, will not be comforted" (SMB Piatt 121)

Being in another mother’s state of grief-haunted stage for the loss of a child,

who would have just been in the breast of her or his mother for milk, Sarah Piatt has

drawn the sympathetic over-tone for her empathetic feeling of ‘fellow-mother’ to

another woman’s child. As a loving mother, she has portrayed a gift of love in her

poems. She’s furious on the loss of her children as she loved them and deeply

cherished their love. She could not enjoy the hopeful world and she was longing and

sorrowful for a better world which could be secured for the children.

The voice of ‘wife’

It is observed in Sarah Piatt's poems that she has written poems by insisting

the significance of love after marriage. The following discussion focuses on the voice

of Sarah Piatt’s speaker as wife.

From around 1900 onwards Sarah Piatt’s family has the effect of the crucial

financial crisis. She could be able to publish only around 25 poems in magazines and

periodicals. By 1914, Sarah’s husband John James Piatt was seriously injured in a

carriage accident. Until he died in the year 1917, he never regained his competence.

Around 1900 a letter was written by Sarah to her son Guy, stating about the

inconvenience in continuing her writing: “My Name and my {pen} have gone…

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wherever the English is spoken”. Sarah Piatt had lived for her writing and gave life

for its art, until her last breathe got farewell in the year 1919 two years later to her

husband’s death.

There was some coherence to all the events narrated above with the signs she

happened to find in her life events from around 1900. One of the signs was left in the

poem entitled ‘The Broken Wedding Ring’, sentimentally. In ‘The Broken Wedding

Ring’ Sarah Piatt had expressed her deeply felt concern for the wedding ring when it

was broken. (Published in MM- Midland Monthly 1:5:11 Dec 19, 1907). There were

three characters involved in it, the Goldsmith, the speaker of the poem (Sarah Piatt)

and abstract presence of the husband. The deeply felt and developed love between the

husband and wife was revealed with ample, chosen words. The meaning of ‘the

wedding ring’ shows how worth it was. The longing for the sustainability of ‘ring’ by

its worth of the survival of the one who (her husband) worn it was negotiable in the

final line of its three quatrains. The repetition of the ‘possessive’ sense with the

notion of ‘dearness’ in the second line and the echo of it in the final line draws the

attention.

Good Master Goldsmith, here is work for you.

Look at my ring, my ring, my wedding-ring.

He said, “Till death.” but I – I thought to rise

With it upon my hand when death was done,--

All else is vanity, all else is dust,

All, but my ring, my ring, my wedding-ring!

Here, the effort to define the conception over the sphere of God, shows the mystical

allusion of Piatt’s nature (“To shine with it into God’s very eyes, / where sun or moon

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or other light is none”). Using the wedding ring in two different places in two

different poetry (“The Broken Wedding Ring (1907)” and, in “Giving Back the

Flower (1867)” – (G 2:4:409 Feb 1867), it could relevantly be viewed in these two

poems through a comparative study between them.

In “Giving back the Flower”, it was mentioned in the second stanza that, “Say,

must you taunt one forever, forever? You looked at my hand and you knew / that I

was the slave of my Ring, while you were as free as the wind is free (lines 5-6) (PB

Bennett 7). In “The Broken Wedding Ring (1907)” to juxtapose it to the lines of the

previous poem (“Giving Back the Flower”) “All else is vanity, all else is dust, / All—

but my ring, my ring, my Wedding-ring! The repetition of scenes in the second and

twelfth (last) line of this poem shows the radical change in understanding the worth of

the price of the wedding ring. From the composition of these two poems, years from

1867 – 1907, it is learnt that the forty years of marriage life had taught her how worth

it was being married with the ‘ring’.

The “Giving Back the Flower” was composed and published at Piatt’s 30th

summer at the wake of her sixth year of “wedding anniversary with John James Piatt,

who married Sarah Morgan Bryan on June 18, 1861 (two months after the

Confederate army took Fort Sumter in the opening hostilities of the Civil War, J.J.

Piatt toped his felicity by marrying Sarah at her Aunt Annie’s house” (PB Bennett

2001, xxv). She had the thought of ‘being restricted” from not going out as freely as

men could go (probably out of the consequences of the civil war effects). She was

married at the age of 25 and the experience of just a six years of married life with the

aftermath effect of war and social conditions made her reveal personal feelings to ‘be

expressed’. But, the completion of forty years of experience in married life with her

husband on his way up and down to the social changes and its impact on both of their

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individual lives made Sarah Piatt understand the mystery of life. That forced her to

acknowledge the divinity of the ‘wedding-ring’ and also made her to confess it in the

poem which she published later. She allowed her sense of admiration of ‘ring’ on its

echo in the beginning and the end. She made God as the witness of her feeling of

wanting her ‘broken ring’ to be with her ever and glittering even after her own death.

The witnessing of God was revealed as “To shine with it into God’s very eyes, /

where sun or moon or other light is done” (PB Bennett 151). She was in need of her

dead husband back. She symbolized husband with the ring.

Apart from motherhood, Sarah Piatt’s stand as the wife of socially responsible

status could serve the purpose of predicting her contemporary livelihood of women.

Sarah Piatt’s ‘The Fancy Ball’ (which was published in Mac (Mac – a- cheek Press)

5:4:348 Aug 10 (1866), is the conversation between a husband and his wife. The

theme is constructed on the wish of a husband to prescribe his preference of a decent

and fair dress to be worn for the costume party. It seems as if, the wife expresses her

staunch dismissal of her husband’s prescription of wearing attire to the party. It shows

more or less the individual preference and authenticity in dressing sense, despite her

husband’s wish (need) to be accomplished. It could be seen in two different ways to

get the actual sense of wish and expression.

The first and foremost is that, being a conventional woman of nineteenth

century Victorian sense, she could have been in favour of her husband’s wish and

suggestion. This could be the sheer basic expectation of a normal social family-

patronage. Had Sarah failed in being committed to the sense of social behaviours as

prescribed as the wish by her husband - would come as a basic question on initial

reading and adherence towards the poetry for its sense of expression? Rather, on the

other hand, whether Sarah (through her speaker) wanted the reality of the family

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status to be seen by the society despite her non-consideration of the frown, and

shrinking of the eye-brows of the other party-men and women who would also

participate in the fancy ball, the costume party.

It also reminds that, Sarah Piatt had used the ‘dramatic-dialogue’ or ‘dramatic

realism’ in her poem. Her style reminds the Robert Browning’s ‘dramatic

monologue’. Browning is known for his ‘My Last Duchess’, through which he reveals

the speaker’s psychological depths and notions in it. Sarah Piatt too had written this

poem in the style of ‘dramatic realism’, in which it could be identified for who would

be the real speaker. It would be possible if one identifies it from some hints and

glimpses out of a very deep reading. In this poetry, Sarah left the readers to assume

that the speakers could either be a pair of lovers or the husband and wife. To be very

specific in consideration of the sensibility of expression, it forced the reader to stop in

negotiating about the characters on husband and wife bondage to deal Sarah with the

Victorian sense. The use of conventional imagery made her aligning for her

preference of realism as a means to express.

The male voice suggests his wife / lover to wear something which would fit

her for showing as beautiful to the viewers in fancy ball. It is in the following stanza;

Or as Spring, with a spray in your hair

Of blossoms as yet unblown;

It will suit you well, for our youth should wear

The bloom in the bud alone (PB Bennett 4)

Yet, the rejection of fancy and preferring the reality of the Sarah’s speaker reveals in

the last stanza:

Then -----“Hush: if I go at all,

(It will make them stare and shrink,

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It will look so strange at a Fancy Ball)

I will look so strange, I think! (4).

The demonstration of fight between the lovers or husband and wife is revealed in ‘A

Pique at Parting’. In the ‘Fancy Ball’ the male voice speaks and provokes his lady to

say about return response. But, in ‘A Pique at Parting’ the lady infers to her husband

to get in response. This poem is in the form of dramatic monologue. Even the un-

uniform in length and meter, and the rhyme scheme enhances the beauty of it. The

first two stanzas are used as questions and obligations. And, in the very sense of

bitterness the third stanza opens fire from the depth of her heart to criticize the ‘self’

nature, nurtured from the other / opposite gender of the speaker. The phrases like ‘My

Lords’ and ‘gentlemen’ collective nouns Sarah Piatt let them play as ironically, she

used them for the female voice to get the attention of the male society for keeping

their counterparts in closed doors and ‘shut-window panes’, as it has been denoted in

the third stanza:-

You leave us the baby to kiss, perhaps; the bird in the cage to sing;

The flower on the window, the fire on the hearth

(and the fires in the heart to feud).

While the wandering hand reaches somewhere, it has become the slave of the Ring,

You give us ---- an image to mend;

Then shut with a careless smile, the door----

(There’s dew or frost on the path before;

We are safe inside. What more? (92).

In this poem if the speaker should be allowed to be Sarah herself, it could be denoted

that, it was out of her husband’s nature of working for his family (in government

consulates both in America and in Ireland before he was forced to leave from his job

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and be settled in the banks of the Ohio River). Sarah had enough time to write poems,

and of course it was out of her husband’s effort, her poems were published in reputed

journals and magazines during when women’s works were typically not published.

Later, both husband and wife published anthologies together (such as in ‘The

Children out of Doors (1855)’, and ‘The Nests at Washington and other poems

(1864)’. Her husband J.J Piatt could have been of much supportive, when magazines

liked her writing more; and got published in maximum of the well known periodicals

in America. It was the time when, women were in homes and were not allowed to be

socially movable as men used to be. But, in this poem, one can easily identify the

hardness in the voice of the speaker against the male gender, without considering the

terrific face of the outer world. Considering herself as lily, she concluded with the

weariness and an additional half-heartedness, as she expressed in ‘The Gift of Tears’,

in this final stanza of the poem;

‘God meant us for saints? Yes--- in Heaven. Well, I for one, am content

To trust Him through the darkness and space to the

End---if an end there shall be;

But, as to His meanings, I fancy I never knew

Quite what He meant.

And----why, what were you saying to me

Of the saints---- or that? It is late;

The lilies weird by the gate.

…. Ah, Sir, as to that ---- we will wait. (92).

She denoted the same in Sarah’s “The Gift of Tears” in the first stanza,

“The legend says: In Paradise

God gave the world to man. Ah me!

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The woman lifted up her eyes:

“Woman, I have but tears for thee.”

But tears? And she began to shed,

Thereat, the tears that comforted. (Piatt 53).

Sarah Piatt, especially, when accompanied her husband to Cork, Ireland, where John

James Piatt was in U.S. Consul until 1893, had got friends eventually including with

Katherine Tynan, Edmund Gosse, Alice Meynell, and Austin Dobson. Moreover,

Ireland proved fertile ground for Sarah Piatt’s poetry, which was characterized by a

light, lyrical expression of domestic scenes and emotions with a recurrent undertone

of melancholy. “In form it was recurrently unconventional. She published several

books during that period. Including ‘And Irish Garland’ (1884), ‘Primrose’ (1886)’,

‘Child’s world Ballads’ (1887), ‘The Witch in the Glass’ (1888), ‘An Irish Wild

Flower’ (1891) and ‘Pictures, Portraits and People in Ireland’ (1893). Her verse was

compared to that of ‘Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning”

(Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., (2012).

Usually, no other marking was available for any dehumanized treatment of

any male voice there to find in her writing. Their view against Sarah’s personal life

may get in turn as nothing but a busted and emptied sense of expression, at last, if

they would leave unconcern of the contribution of her husband till his death. In

revamping of the past glory of Piatt’s poems, scholars and critics are sensitive in

handling Sarah’s poems for her real nature of expression so as to make her

contributions known to the American Literary world. For unknown reasons Sarah

Piatt was forgotten for nearly a century and in the other world of literature too, it

became necessary of recollecting it for studying the happenings of Sarah Piatt’s

contemporary, the conventional era of both literally rich and realistically truthful.

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Sarah Piatt’s “Wifely Devotion”

On writing poems like ‘Lady Franklin’ on themes of ‘wifely devotion’, Sarah

had taken effort to explore the quality of true wife, “who could even wait for a twelve

long years in faith as Lady Franklin, the wife of an explorer namely Sir.John

Franklin”, (who disappeared when he was on his expedition of the northwest

passages) (PB Bennett 2001, 170). Unfortunately, after the twelve years of waiting

she could outfit an expedition that successfully located her dead husband’s body-

remains. In this poetry of symbolism, Sarah had portrayed Lady Franklin as the

nineteenth century’s symbol of ‘Devotional wife’. Critics could not even bring any ill

impression on the personal characteristics of Piatt. Rather, some used to bring staunch

criticism for the usage of hard phrases and words against the society that was

dominantly occupied by the male writers. To be clear with this sense, Jess Robert’s

article on ‘Sarah Piatt’s grammar of convention’ could be read from the beginning of

her introduction.

A sadden pathway she

Sought, seeking him. Pathway to Love! Where hidden

Can that fair Secret be?

Who wrings from any wave or any tree

The thing most precious ---- pearl or fruit forbidden?!

The end of her husband’s exploring voyage had finally ended up in bringing Lady

Franklin a wave of unhappiness out of his death

Oh, after that vague quest

Among weird winds, in Icy deserts lonely,

Has she lain down to rest

Under Palm, whose light leaves on her breast

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Drops balms of summer, sun and silence only?! (62).

This question and answer style of Sarah is intended for the loyalty of a wife and

revealed it in the final stanza:

Has some are whispered, “Why

O woman faithful, why this dark delaying

Outside the pleasant sky? ----

How could you seek me in the snows, when I

Here, in the loveliest Land of all, was staying? (62).

The faithful woman for the return of her husband had encountered a question from the

world for “Why not be united with the normal stream of the society, probably by

remarrying and fly in ‘the pleasant sky’ of life. Probably, this notion might be of

Sarah on Lady Franklin’s staunch belief in the return of her husband or in the self-

ascertain to her own state of mind on keeping with the place of Lady Franklin. The

answering lines are used as whipping on both the social perspective and the

psychology emitted one of ‘self’ (for discussion sake) as;

How could you seek me in the snows, when I

Here, in the loveliest Land of all, way staying? (62).

This couple of lines can also be seen as the husband’s utterance through the spirit of

imagination of the wife. It had that sense of negotiation of the death of her husband to

search for him in the snows, rather than to stay in the lovely land of all (probably

America itself). The aim of the narrator and the tone of the poems induce the mood of

interest of the reader for negotiation that would get rewarded at the end for being

loyal. It adds further that every loyal wife would be in the place of Lady Franklin as

the symbol of ‘loyalty of wife’ on practice and for that she would be rewarded.

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Sarah Piatt’s ‘The Coming of Eve’ leaves impression on the stability of being

a wife to the husband, who might undergo the pain and pause in conducting the life

happily. Even though this poem is entirely written as a letter to her son denoting the

hardship they two (Sarah Piatt and her husband J.J. Piatt) were forced to undergo by

the changes in work places of J.J Piatt. This also speaks about how the social world

was moving with full of troubles. She could have used ‘troubled waters’ as an image

for the instability in the native and in Ireland as well. Also, Sarah in this narration had

dealt about the pride and the plight of husband and wife, together. She had given

much intention to bring out the utter dejection for being a female in society who is

living with all ‘unsaid’ events of life with tears too sometimes. According to her faith

in the dogmas of religion the world was created to man and the woman to serve him

with her heart, which was given as a gift of God. Either, Sarah had used ‘Heart

beating, (as) the gift of god’ as really a gifted for contentment and bliss or for bearing

the pathos of life and to pass the same into her future generation? That has to be

negotiated without neglecting the sense of prediction as expressed in the following

stanza;

God gave the world to Man. With eyes entreating,

The woman said: “Hast Thou no gift for me?”

“Yea, woman! In thy breast a Heart is beating!”

The Father spake. “That is my gift to thee!

Eve----passing---left his gift to all her daughters.

Is man a wanderer from his home apart?

Do great winds hurt him over troubled waters?

Faints he on stand? She follows with her Heart! (149).

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In the final line it is revealed that with her 'Heart' Sarah had followed her husband

who was struggling to run his family. In the final stanza the mature absorption of life

by admitting the error in life was portrayed. It was done by mending them and the

confrontation between the husband and wife would make her question faith in God. It

could be negotiated from the following lines;

She has her little wrongs. To bear or mend them

Is what she --- must! God gave the world to Man.

To her He gave – her troubles! He will end them!

But meanwhile, let her help Him as she can! (149).

Showing the grim face and lashing out the one who was found to be guilty or would

like in doing second marriage is expressed in another peculiar nature of the poem and

of the speaker of the poetry entitled “A Woman’s Last Word” (CWB 1895): 80 – 1)

(Child’s world Ballads: Three Little Emigrants: A Romance of Cork Harbour, 1884,

etc., Robert Clarke and Co. 1887). The usage of three pro-nouns, firstly the ‘Men’ (as

collective to instruct it to the whole men); secondly, the ‘You’ – (as used both in the

contexts of second Person singular to her-known / dear most and in the second person

plural form of the Men's society). Thirdly, the ‘I’ (to the speaker’s stand) keeps the

self-assertion to be with all the places to understand the theme of the poetry. In these

four quatrains, she vehemently criticized the men who used to marry another woman

after the death of their wives.

As a voice of the whole female society, the speaker of this poem tried to

establish the promises of marriage, once again to keep up the promise. But, the

repeated usage of the phrase ‘Promise me nothing’ at the beginning of all the four

quatrains ironically shows the ‘disapproval’ of the (broken) promise, after the death of

the beloved wife (wives). If the second person plural form of ‘you’ to be applied, at

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first, to get one aspect of the vision of the speaker, it could be fit to the voice of a

female speaker against the whole of the opposite gender for their breaking up of their

marriage day promise “Till Death”. The vow of both man and woman on marriage

day is discussed in the following lines;

I… take you…

To be my wife (or husband)

To have and to hold

From this day forward

For better, for worse

For richer, for poorer

In sickness and in health

To love and to cherish

Till death do us part

According to God’s holy law;

And this is my solemn Promise.

According to the poet, the promise had been broken by the men after the passing away

of their life partners and used to find another woman for second marriage;

Promise me nothing. Men are mortal. I

Loose from your heart my hand.

(The grave is deeper than the heavens are high.)

My house – of love – was builded on the sand……..

Promise me nothing. One day you will bud

Another ring, you knew.

Then, if the dead walk in their sleep, must I

Come, shivering, back to say – “I told you so (144).

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It reveals another view for getting ‘if’ sense for whether Sarah Piatt was

writing this out of her own father’s experience and experiment with his first and

second marriage. And, the consequences of it like making him / his daughter, Sarah

Piatt leaving from beautiful and happy home. This poem has its continuation or a link

with another poem titled “The Broken Wedding Ring”

The Voice of ‘Beloved’

Among Sarah Piatt's multiple voices and narrators in her poems, the role of

beloved takes a significant place. Through this Piatt had expressed the nature of

treatment of love in the 19th Century bourgeois life.

The definition and nature of the present day love seem to be different much

from the past one of the 19th century conventional society of America and the rest of

the world. Bennett predicts from the poems of Piatt when she says the following;

“… The speaker’s antebellum romantic fantasies are used as measures against

which the “real” worth of Southern romanticism is tested. For all its masquerade of

heterosexual desire, southern romanticism turns out in those poems to be little more

than a veil disguising the economic motives that drove (landless) men and women to

pursue (landed) members of the opposite sex in an economy in which land, fortune,

and statuses were one. Piatt’s father appears to have availed himself of this strategy

twice, but most notably in his second marriage." (Bennett, xlv).

Poems like “Giving Back the Flower”, “Siempre”, “A Party in a Dream”, are

dealing with the domestic love much. And, poems like “Shapes of a Soul”, “Sorrows

of Charlotte”, “Two Veils”, and “The Lament of My Lady” are examples of the men’s

love of their lady loves, in which they so long were trying to understand for what

would be in the mind and hearts of the lady loves.

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In spite of loving before marriage love after marriage was common in Piatt’s

poems she had also expressed love before marriage in a very few poems. In “The

Lament of My Lady” the love between the beloved and the man who wore the

marriage ring was considered to be a blockade against the wit and sweetness of the

beloved. It is expressed as confession and critical mentioning through the following

stanzas.

The author’s self portrayal of beauty as she is beautiful for men to see that is

not the real beauty. Rather, the beauty lies in the soft-corner of the heart for the death

and sufferings of others, she denotes.

My beauty stirs within me strife.

For men to see—am I for this?

Where others suffer death and life;

Shall I have just a look, a kiss?

A simple living for a married life cannot bring any fruit of happiness for the service is

needed for the society. She ridicules the art of wearing the wedding ring sometimes as

clownish. She diminishes her art of portrayal of events through her writing by

comparing her voice to the voice of the wild bird;

Why, any clown can wear a ring

Of gold my head cannot outshine;

The wild bird in the air can sing

With what diviner voice than mine. (Bennett 73).

Piatt had used a Spanish word as a title for one of her poem entitled ‘Siempre’ which

means ‘Always’. Through this poem Piatt had revealed the might of love between the

lovers quoted in the following stanzas. The evergreen beauty of a moon could be

faded before the beauty of the ladylove. The closeness of lovers kept them to be very

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happy. The ladylove’s warm breath and sigh are sensed by the lover. The author

denotes one such event in the following lines;

No light but the moon’s pale glimmer

Shone here; in a trance they seemed.

He could feel the breath of her sighing,

And his eyes in the darkness gleamed.

“Have you thought of me, love,” he whispered,

“All these lonely weeks gone past?”

She could only murmur “Siempre,”

But her heart beat loud and fast.

In contrast to this feeling of love through the expression ‘siempre’ (always) to the

question of her lover, Piatt added the following stanza to show the unhealthy love and

relationship between a husband and wife, that might have made the lady to move with

another man;

His arms were about her tightly,

(O to die in those arms were bliss!)

And their lips for one mad, sweet moment,

Close clung in a lingering kiss.

Ah! Why did they go to the tower

The moonlit valley to see?

And why did she whisper “Siempre”

When he said “have you thought of me?

The metaphor “A cloud passed over the moon” used in the following stanza leaves

much negotiation over the nature of the author. In order to foretell the events of a

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disloyal ladylove Piatt might have used the metaphor. The final stanza of the poem

reveals the reason for the error committed by the lady. It is found in the following

lines;

And she went back to duty

By an unloved husband’s side;

And he to his worldly pleasures

And his search for a wealthy bride (Bennett 59).

In “Giving Back the Flower” the denunciation of love is expressed while the offering

of a flower as the symbol of love to be expressed that was mentioned as the reason for

the refusal. It was just because of time’s need and it was not the love of man alone.

Something beyond than the abstract love was needed to overcome the social needs

where the economic imbalances were the check points. It could be seen in the

following lines:

Take back your flower, I tell you—of its sweetness I now have no need;

Yes; take back your flower down into the stillness and mystery to keep;”

The following poetic lines of various poems would also be serving in this context:

The sharper the words the deeper the love shown: In “Shapes of a Soul” the deeper

feeling of love was expressed through;

If I shall ask you in some shining hour,

When bees and odours through the clear airs pass,

You’ll say my soul buds as a small flush’d flower,

Far off, half hiding, in the old home-grass, (Bennett 8)

And, in “A Lily of the Nile”, the prolonged love of a lady was a predictable evidence

for how the loyal love was kept in the absence of the lover;

Who was the beautiful woman whose lover

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Once left her this dead old flower, did you say?

Well, perhaps that is she in the picture over

The blossoms you brought me to-day? (9).

The following discussion carries the appearance of a poet as part of the woman’s

voice as Beloved:

In the poem entitled “Her Lover’s Trail” the speaker was the lady love and her

expectation to be loved became futile and her disappointment was expressed with a

sad tone. The love started blooming on a night before when the moonlight came and

ended when the morning light made the moonshine a fading. And, it was ended as

deep dejection as the lover’s expectation went beyond the actual beauty of the

ladylove and heart. It seemed something more than the actual nature and instead of

looking at the beauty of the heart the lover’s eyes went on searching for mere

appearance. As the phrases used by the speaker showed as if ‘the lady love was poor

and having worn unfair clothing, the love was dropped because of that by the lady

saying ‘Good bye” at the end. In expressing the actual nature of a woman who was

having nothing but ‘flowerless hair’, ‘un-jeweled breast’, ‘mourning garments’ and

having Sun as the only guest to her home’, she was weary out of her nature as denoted

in the following stanza;

With flowerless hair un-jeweled breast,

And mourning garments, stood I near

I took the sun to be my guest

And show him all he had to fear.

And, the reason for leaving from her lover would be the pale beauty of the lady-love

which was unfair. That was why the author included the phrase, “I think – a woman

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should be fair” as an ironical statement in between the descriptions of love and beauty

of the lover despite the spending of a long time in last night’s moonshine-pass;

Will? Love and Love and Love it was,

Through last night’s moonshine, everywhere.

“But—did not last night’s moonshine pass?

I think – a woman should be fair.

The departure of the lover from the dream, the lady love had left with much dejection.

She forgot his face and his eyes had gone farther from her feelings of love. That led

her to assume the sky full of stars as vague and empty sky only. Her “Good bye” to

her lovely dream evoked the reader understand the expectation and restriction to it

through the following lines:

His eyes were farther from my heart

Than any stars in you vague sky:

“Sir, I forgive your dream we part

In the plain daylight?” “Yes-Good-Bye!” (Bennett 74)

In this second part of poem numbered as ‘II’ it was denoted that the (expression of)

poverty was the other reason for why love was dropped as witnessed in the following

stanza;

Nay, sir—this hand you try to touch

Must drop its diamonds in the dust,

Must bleed with thorns, and reach for much

Beyond your flowers and wines, I trust. (74: II).

In “Giving Back the Flower” Sarah had allowed her southern identification in

defining the lover who might be ‘the dead’ through the echo of these two phrases like

“a Woman in jewels” and “and lace” could also be found in her “Her Lover’s Trial”

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as “Sudden spell of pearls”, “and lace”. The southern identification of Sarah’s

speaker’s soldier-lover could also be witnessed in many poems like in “One from the

Dead” (1871), “A Ghost at the Opera” (1873), (Bennett 227).

From the words of PB Bennett about the treatment of romantic love in Sarah

Piatt's poems, it is found that "Piatt's critique of romantic love is allied to her poetry in

the South and on the Civil War, even when she was not explicitly dealing with the

American South itself." (Bennett xliii).

In "Lily of the Nile" and in "Her Rescue" the identification of the woman

speaker of the poems lays in the images of Cleopatra. The impact of war had been

registered here as the war destructed the beauty of the nation / her country, her lover,

soldier, and herself too. She denoted it in the following lines;

And who was her lover?" why, that maybe he, there,

In the other picture glimmering wish--

Yes, the handsome and wreathed man you see there,

Falling against his sound to die. (9).

The speaker showed the pride of Marc Antony, the Roman General. As Cleopatra had

chosen him as her lover among the enemies the speaker had also chosen her lover

who died by falling against the sword in the battle field.

But, it was not clearly said in the lines whether the ladylove in the poetry had

also given her life for her loved one who died in the battle field. Since, the lovers of

the poetry were compared with Cleopatra and Marc Antony who were killing

themselves for the loss of each other's life as the expression of meaning to the true

love. It would be expected in this elegiac voice of the woman of the poetry. It's

narrated as the woman speaker was placed on the heels of Cleopatra. Thereby, the

suffering of the loss by the death of her lover was expressed in the following stanzas;

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And who gave it to me?... So the wither'd story

I've dream'd by the twilight all this while

For some vanished blossom's ay of story

Is your truth, my Lily of the Nile.

For the beautiful woman is slowly dying

Of a snake as plain as this to my sight;

And her lover who gave her this flower is lying

On the edge of a sword to-night. (9).

Octavius Caesar defeated his opponent's combined forces in the naval battle at

Actium (31.B.C.E.). Antony committed suicide by falling on his sword, and Cleopatra

committed suicide not long thereafter (Bennett, 164). That reflects the tragic pains of

both Antony and Cleopatra and the lovers in the poetry entitled "A Lily of the Nile".

In Sarah Piatt's "Her Rescue" the most denotable phrases had been used to

express the truthfulness in love between Cleopatra and Marc Antony. The tender

message through the death of Cleopatra, had left some markings in the lines of poetry

as if the punishment for the crime of Caesar (?) might be offered with the pain, while

he had time to see the dead body of Cleopatra: the pathetic scene's reflection showed

that the real love stops at one, with whom both Cleopatra and the speaker of the poem

had shared their love in total. That had moved to take the extreme end of the life as

they heard the news about the death of the dearly loved heroes like Marc Antony and

the soldier lover. Both of them died in the battlefield against the sword:

I send you greeting - by an asp.

May it, my beautiful, find you in time.

Take it up tenderly, and let is clasp

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Your heart from pain and crime.

Caesar awaits you. Will you grace

His triumph-marches through the dust to Rome?

Or keep the desperate glory of your place

In silent scorn at home? (Bennett 26).

In this last couple of poems, the truthfulness in love, the self-destruction of the native

land and South are dealt as the two different aspects of love and social realism. These

two aspects are fused to express the poetic qualities. The diction is used properly for

bringing out the intangible need of the making two different aspects like love and

realism which are sprouting the romanticism and social responsibility.

Conclusion

Thus from the above discussion, it is learnt that unlike most of the Southern

women who would be indulged in luxurious life Piatt seemed to be less fortunate. In

the 19th century, women were not given any political rights. But, there had been only

a very few yet, strong impressions found to be the voice giving in her writing for the

suffrage movement of her contemporary period. There was no such sign or working

of Piatt.

The nineteenth century women in America had their varied notions since there

were women of Native Indian, American White women and the Afro American

women. Mostly, women took more responsibility than men. The women’s

responsibilities include the farming, raising the children, taking care of household

responsibilities, and performing other odd jobs also. Until the rise of some women's

movements for the appraisal of women’s livelihood equal to the men’s status, women

were neglected from getting educated and only in the upper crest and some middle

class women had the privilege to get educated.

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Being a middle class woman the author had the privilege to get educated. Her

education made her interested in writing poems about social events and domestic

themes. In this discussion, the multiple voices of women have been registered. Unlike

the underprivileged white American women who were able to help support their

families alone Sarah Piatt had been given unrestricted freedom for her writing. That

helped her to focus on the plight of the 19th American society. In this chapter,

especially, the various roles involved in the livelihood of women were pointed out

with ample examples from the poems of Piatt. Being a mother to her children, she had

shown the unlimited fondness and caring for them.

Through her status as wife she had expressed the importance of being lovable,

loyal and ever steady in any odd circumstances. By indicating the meaning of love,

from her poems she allowed her speakers to be very prompt in love. She portrays the

soldiers’ love that died in war. Other than the common natures of all three transitions

of a woman, Piatt expressed varied aspects and roles of women, which would be the

best examples for the future generation for learning to be in all such roles as did the

author.

During the 19th century social events centred on the domestic situations, most

of the female writers let their writing to be revolved around the domestic happenings

especially for the children and love towards their beloved Masters. Some notable

women poets had been in their exposures to the social causes like Sarah Piatt,

Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard and others. This brief study was made on Sarah

Piatt’s treatment of motherhood and her vital role in bringing out the social and

domestic-gothic events of her contemporary era. From this study it is found that the

motherhood, wifely devotion and the loyalty in loving are the main characteristics

portrayed through the multiple voices of speakers. Piatt has not only given a view of

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the genteel qualities of the mother but also identified the socially responsible roles of

a mother through her characterizations of women. All these three transitions

expressed serve to exhibit the 19th century social realism.