‘Stifling Up the Vale’

The title of this chapter may appear deliberately provocative, but there is, let me assure readers, a reasonably serious – if, from Keats’s perspective, rarely reasonable – point behind it. Besides, the title’s partially obscured word, including (vitally, for my argument) the partial obscuration, is taken from Keats himself, from one of his letters. In the discussions that follow, I want to propose that the semantic and psychic contours of genitally focused episodes in Keats are further shaped by the poet’s equivocal relationship with two ostensibly discrete, but in fact mutually complicating, epistemologies regarding women’s ‘reality’ (Letters, I, 341). The first was circulated through male communities, disseminated in ‘Card playing Clubs’, and in colourful, sexually explicit drawing-room badinage. ¹ While a whole continuum of inter-male relational dynamics – as explored by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book, Between Men (1985) – may be supposed to have existed in these homosocial settings, ² I am interested in Keats ‘among Men’ (Letters, I, 341) primarily in so far as these ‘knowing’ communities presented him with legitimized modes of masculine desire for women. The second educational tradition was absorbed during medical tutelage, which entailed, among other things, obstetric training with apothecary-surgeon Thomas Hammond, and physical anatomy lectures at Guy’s Hospital. ³ Both traditions of knowledge – what I am calling ‘social’ and ‘medical’ – actually unsettled Keats profoundly, and never more so than when they cut against each other in complex ways. Nevertheless, I want to demonstrate, Keats was compulsively drawn in his writings to confront the dual epistemic grounds of his physiological aversion.