Alan Richardson (Boston College)
When British Romantic poets want to make female characters seem at once seductive and dangerous, they endow them with a peculiar linguistic ability: the power to communicate, even to overwhelm, with semantically meaningless sounds. Female figures--many of them otherworldly--in poems by Coleridge, Scott, Landor, and Keats variously hiss and murmur, "make sweet moan" or "bubble like honey," sing in a foreign tongue or "lull" in "language strange," even hum like bees. Why do these semantically empty but rhythmic, muted noises have the power to turn the male characters to whom they are addressed lovestruck and passive, supine and spellbound? I will draw on two bodies of theoretical work rarely considered together in pursuing this question: evolutionary esthetics and poststructuralist semiotics. Ellen Dissanayake's Art and Intimacy brings psycholinguistic research on "motherese" together with evolutionary research into maternal behavior to suggest strong links between verbal art and the infant's first experience of language. Earlier, Julia Kristeva's notion of the "semiotic" had posed a similar connection on purely theoretical grounds. Male Romantic poets, with their pronounced interest in infant behavior (evinced, for example, in Coleridge's Notebooks and Wordsworth's Prelude), their interest in contemporary theories of extrasemantic communication, and their well-known obsession with maternal figures and behaviors seem to have intuited and represented a comparable connection between maternal vocalization and the infant's similtaneous entry into semiotic behavior and the first loving relationship. Their ambivalence toward female power and sexuality, however, lend a markedly sinister aura to their poetic representations of quasi-maternal speech.