While reading Charlotte Smith's works I began to notice traces of her own experiences being reflected in the themes and components of her writing. I've discovered that Smith delt with financial issues the majority of her life due to the men in her life not properly handling finances and their economic decisons correctly. Due to her father's overspending, Charlotte was forced to marry at a very young age to a man named Benjamin Smith, who led their family of 12 children into a huge hole of debt along with poisoning his marriage with infidelity, physical abuse, and disrespect. After 22 years of matrimonial discord, Smith finally divorced Benjamin Smith. This was a very extraordinary action for a woman of her time, that took a great deal of courage. Once she had fully escaped Smith began writing to earn a living for herself and her twelve children. Benjamin's father left his estate to Charlotte and her children, but the will was full of legal problems and the money remained frustratingly inaccessible during her lifetime, producing a legal quagmire that would inspire the infamous Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce case in Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House (1852–53). I found it very interesting that her own personal experience inspired a male author to write of the legal and financial problems women like Charlotte Smith faced. Themes from Smith's life appeared throughout her novels, which follow the sentimental tradition while openly critiquing parental figures who remain in broken marriages, legal systems that promote fraud and injustice, and social abuses of power. In Emmeline (1788), her heroine narrowly escapes marriage to a charming yet destructive man, and in The Old Manor House (1793) a hidden will restores the rightful inheritor to his estate. Both novels orquestrasted Smith's own personal experiences, and her contradictory romantic propensities that fueled her strong beliefs in reguard to legal systems, politics and social corruptions.
Works Cited:
Godfrey, Esther. "Smith, Charlotte." In Maunder, Andrew, ed Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= ELR0310&SingleRecord=True (accessed April 9, 2012).
No comments:
Post a Comment