"Strange longings": Keats and feet.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

THERE ARE MORE FEET IN KEATS'S POETRY THAN MIGHT BE SUPPOSED--and by feet, I am referring to those found on the end of legs, not the metrical variety. Feet figure in various ways: for example, Keats visualized his poetic career in terms of "daring steps" he hoped to tread along the "bright path[s] of light" left by Britain's great poets ("Specimen of an Induction to a Poem" 57, 60). (1) Many other references, on first sight at least, are formulaic. A lady's feet are always "white" (Endymion 2.325), (2) "light" ("La Belle Dame sans Merci" 15), (3) or "nimble" (Lamia 1.96). However, from a psychoanalytic perspective, and drawing specifically on Freud's 1927 paper "On Fetishism," I suggest that Keats's attention to feet--"things on which the dazzled senses rest / Till the fond, fixed eyes, forget they stare" (4)--cannot simply be explained, or contained, within the terms of conventional imagery. Closer examination opens a narrative into an intriguing libidinal economy, founded on what Keats himself called his "Boyish imagination." Within this exchange "normative" early nineteenth-century notions of manliness, female sexuality, and desire itself are radically unfixed by physiological apprehension.

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Keats's ambivalent relationship to "manliness" has often been remarked on. As Anne K. Mellor reminds us, Keats believed his appearance was girlish. (5) Reviewers confirmed this image by portraying him as a "Cockney" poet, a label that readers would have recognized as containing a sense of effeminacy. (6) Or else, employing what Susan Wolfson calls "a puerilising rhetoric," Keats was presented to the reading public as an immature boy. (7) In both cases, detractors aimed to discredit Keats's literary productions by questioning his manliness, and thus his right to be taken seriously by a "grown-up" audience. Blackwood's "Z" (John Gibson Lockhart) called Keats "a boy of pretty abilities"; (8) in 1826 the journal referred to his "emasculated pruriency." (9) In private Byron showed less restraint, vehemently dismissing "Johnny Keats's piss-a-bed poetry" (Wolfson 95).

Keats was conscious that he harbored a vulnerability to attacks of this kind. In 1819 he complained to his brother and sister-in-law: "My name with the literary fashionables is vulgar--I am a weaver boy to them." (10) Nevertheless, he did not deny the centrality of immaturity to his life and art. On the contrary, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey in July 1818, he refers uneasily to his "Boyish imagination," which he supposes has prevented him from developing a "right feeling towards women":

I am certain I have not a right feeling towards Women--Is it because they fall so far beneath my Boyish imagination? When I was a Schoolboy I though[t] a fair Woman a pure Goddess, my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept though she knew it not--I have no right to expect more than their reality. [...] When I am among Women I have evil thoughts, malice spleen--I cannot speak or be silent--I am full of Suspicions [...] I am in a hurry to be gone--You must be charitable and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since Boyhood. (LJK 1.341)

He adds despairingly: "I must absolutely get over this--but how?" (LJK 1.342). Later I will suggest ways in which Keats attempted to overcome his wrong feelings. Displaying a precocious talent for self-analysis here, Keats identifies a conflict between his boyish conception of women as "pure goddesses" and his more mature, if troubled, notion of what he calls "their reality." I am not merely suggesting that these rival concepts help generate such dualistic figures as La Belle Dame, Moneta, or Lamia, whose head, as every student knows, "was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet! / She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete" (1.59-60). Rather, my discussion discloses a compelling psychological drama in Keats's letters and poetry, in which a reluctance to respond to or represent women in any way other than "boyishly" is repeatedly demonstrated. Whilst it may not be surprising to suggest that his poetry is frequently immature, given that Keats died at the age of twenty-five, I will show in precise terms how this immaturity manifests itself through the representations of the fetishistic imagination.

In an engaging article on Keats's Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, Diane Long Hoeveler insists that "just as we know from dream analysis that everything in the dream is a manifestation of the dreamer, so everything in the poem is a projection of some aspect of the poet." (11) This liberating methodology allows us to perceive in Keats's writing psychological dilemmas that not only inflected the ways in which Keats constructed female sexuality, but ones that were also central to the formation of his own sexuality. The master clue in this respect, and the one that opens a new perspective on Keats's "boyishness," is the poet's enduring interest in feet. If this sounds frivolous, preposterous even (and I am prepared to concede that at this stage it does), possibly it is because no one, to my knowledge, has commented on the extraordinary frequency--the altogether extraordinariness--of feet and foot-related imagery in Keats's work. The following sections explore episodes in which Keats's attention to feet registers deeper anxieties about sex and/ with women. Despite Jean Hagstrum's contention that "Keats delights in consummation," I contend that foot episodes document the conversion in Keats's poetics of "normative" early nineteenth-century modes of mature desire and sexual fulfillment into a "boyish" erotics that is voyeuristic, fetishistic, and deferred. (12)

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I begin with a bizarre fiction (but in terms of male psychology, possibly a "true Story" as Keats claims), recounted by the poet to James Rice in 1819: (13)

Would you like a true Story "There was a Man and his Wife who being to go a long journey on foot, in the course of their travels came to a River which rolled knee deep over the pebbles--In these cases the Man generally pulls off his shoes and stockings and carries the woman over on his Back. This man did so; and his Wife being pregnant and troubled, as in such cases is very common, with strange longings, took the strangest that was ever heard of--Seeing her Husband's foot, a handsome on [one] enough, look very clean and tempting in the clear water, on their arrival at the other bank she earnestly demand{ed} a bit of it; he being an affectionate fellow and fearing for the comeliness of his child gave her a bit which he cut off with his Clasp knife--Not satisfied she asked another morsel--supposing there might be twins he gave her a slice more. Not yet contented she craved another Piece. "You Wretch cries the Man, would you wish me to kill myself? take that!" Upon which he stabb'd her with the knife, cut her open and found three Children in her...

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