Mohammad Shahidul Islam Chowdhury*
Abstract: This paper projects the theme of repression as depicted in the poems of Charlotte Mew. Emerging as a late Victorian fictionist, she commits ultimately as a pre-modernist poet, focusing on two overt yet unacknowledged themes: patriarchal domination and sexual repression. In her poems, she uses not a female voice but one that she finds as an authoritative agency around her. Her personal life is merged in some of her poems, which dawn on the identity issue she suffers from. Unmarried all through her life for an anticipated genealogical concern, she rather has the lesbian sexual inclination, not heterosexual. This develops a paradoxical angst in her in the sense that being a woman she not only finds interest in other women, but uses male attire and life-style as well. Her failure to develop a lesbian relationship leads to the repression of her self, which tries to be free taking the standpoint against the forces that strive to dominate her. In this sense, she is doubly alienated: by the females first, and then the male ones. The male voice in her poems is an iconoclast averse to the conventional heterosexual relationship and the patriarchy. It becomes an open arena for revealing the fight that she experiences within her society. This paper aims to investigate how Mew’s poems, at a time of repression and supremacy, become a voice for the self.
Keywords: Charlotte Mew, repression, self, madness, Victorian
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