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Abstract
Although the wanderer is one of the central figures in male canonical Romantic poetry, one also finds this recurring trope in the long-neglected female poets of the Romantic period. In exploring the connection between wandering and the “female sublime,” this thesis redefines and expands the traditional figure of the wanderer. Focusing on Kant's and Burke's concepts of the sublime as the theoretical framework, I study Mary Robinson's, Charlotte Smith's, and Letitia Landon's wanderers in connection with the recurring themes of death, fragmentation, the stage, melancholy, nostalgia, madness, and exile. This thesis argues that the female wanderer internalizes the inner divisions, the possibilities, and the element of violence intrinsic to the experience of the sublime. By perceiving her own fragmented, split identity as an object of sublime terror, she not only sees herself as a monstrously incoherent and terrifying “Other,” but also as carrying imaginative and theatrical sublime potential.
