Jealous of Madmen

The poetry of Charlotte Smith is commonly interpreted as conforming to conservative feminine themes.  However, in the body of this essay I will argue that in Sonnet LXX Smith expresses a desire for transgression in the form of masculine liberation and sexual freedom that manifests itself as the desire for lunacy. I will argue that Smith’s ‘envy’ of the lunatic is an envy of his freedom outside of societal constraints, his relative sexual freedom as a man in Victorian society, and his association with the moon and the cosmos, a space that exists outside of constructions and artifices of nature and the picturesque. I will argue that a psychoanalytic interpretation could translate this desire as ‘penis envy’, and discuss historicist evidence of the relationship between insanity and sex, and transgression and the death drive.