Gender Play in "The Egyptian Maid"

"The Egyptian Maid; or the Romance of the Water Lily," published in Yarrow Revisited, brings into focus Wordsworth's attitude toward women in the later poetry. It also raises related questions of genre and gender, since he terms his only Arthurian poem a romance and places at its center a female character, Nina, the Lady of the Lake. Dora Wordsworth seems to be the presiding genius of this poem. Wordsworth wrote "The Egyptian Maid" quickly and happily in 1828, after several nonproductive months. Family letters reveal that during its composition the poet was unusually free from the ailments that generally plagued his attempts at writing. Mary Wordsworth reports to Edward Quillinan, "Wm … has within the last 8 days composed a Poem (for the next Keepsake) of about 300 lines without let or hindrance from one uneasy feeling either of head or stomach" (LY 1:665, 25 November 1828); and in the same letter Wordsworth himself adds that "The Poem Mrs W—mentions is a sort of Romance—with no more solid foundation than the word—water lily but dont mention it—it rose out of my mind like an exhalation" (667). Although the literary source of this "exhalation" is Milton's description of Pandemonium in the first book of Paradise Lost

("Out of the earth a Fabric huge / Rose like an Exhalation," 710–11), Wordsworth does not recall the sublime context of the Miltonic scene. Rather, Wordsworth associates the genre of romance with ease and playfulness: the genre seems to provide both the space for a fantasy of female power and a way to contain that power so that it does not become a threat. Wordsworth embraces the magic of romance that he had rejected twenty years earlier in The White Doe of Rylstone, but he dismisses any serious implications. Significantly, Wordsworth revises his earlier stance in terms of both genre and gender.

On the same day that the Wordsworths wrote to Quillinan, William wrote a letter to George Huntly Gordon, in which he connects his romance directly with Dora:

Our employments are odd enough here; my Daughter is at this moment, in my sight, finishing a picture of a Dragon—and I have just concluded a kind of romance with as much magic in it as would serve for half a Dozen—but I prefer poems to Dragons for my aerial journey. I hope you will be pleased with this poem of 360 verses when you see it—it rose from my brain, without let or hindrance, like a vapour.

(LY 1:663)

Here the "exhalation" becomes "vapour," but Wordsworth continues to emphasize the lightness and ease of composition. He also identifies his poem as a romance in a qualified way (the "sort of" becomes "kind of"), as if not wanting to claim too much for this 360-line poem. He draws a connection between Dora and his romance: both father and daughter, metaphorically speaking, are dragon-makers, creators of pictures and plots in which aerial journeys and magical transformations are possible. Dora inspires her father, accustomed to making his own life the matter of his song, to write his first Arthurian romance. Dora, indeed, inspires both the magic of romance and Wordsworth's wish to contain and domesticate the feminine power and mystery associated with it.

Wordsworth judges "The Egyptian Maid" to be a strange poem, but he seems to have been liberated by the Arthurian fantasy. As Mary Wordsworth reveals, this poem was first destined for The Keepsake along with "The Triad," although it was not actually published until 1835. Wordsworth's letters reveal that he became quite absorbed in the poem, but this does not preclude the possibility that he also shaped it for the Keepsake audience—casual readers of embellished gift books. This is a far cry from the nervous author of The White Doe devising a theory of reception around his fears of publication. Now Wordsworth resents that he has to consider publishing in a keepsake simply because he is offered a tempting amount. He writes to a publisher, Samuel Carter Hall

(5 June ?1835): "You are perhaps aware that the Annuals with their ornaments, have destroyed the Sale of several Poems which—till that Invention of some evil Spirit (a German one I believe) was transplanted to this Country—brought substantial profit to their Authors, [and] were regarded as Standard works…. Competition, the Idol of the Political economists, in fact ruins every thing" (LY 3:55–56). Resentful of his own contributions to this "Idol," Wordsworth would have much preferred to control the profits and presentation of his own "Standard works."^[22] Perhaps the crowning irony is that Wordsworth used the money he received from The Keepsake to finance his 1828 tour (LY 1:64n).

"The Egyptian Maid," nonetheless, is one of Wordsworth's concessions to the popular market. In seeming to write an airy and insubstantial romance, Wordsworth may have felt safely removed from his private life and his conflicted age, and thus the poem would be suitable for casual drawing-room consumption. But despite its lightness, Wordsworth's poem presents anxious and ineffective fathers. And in this work written for the most conventional kind of publication, Wordsworth surprises us with unconventional gender roles: bumbling men and strong women.

In "The Egyptian Maid" Wordsworth takes his characters' names from Malory, but he creates his own narrative of the ship, The Water Lily, carrying an Egyptian maid to Arthur's court. Since this poem is not as well known today as it was in the 1830s, some plot summary may be necessary. Merlin wrecks the ship because he envies its beauty and independence, but Nina, whose role remains unacknowledged, brings about a happy resolution of events. The main text of "The Egyptian Maid" falls into three episodes: Merlin's jealousy of and destruction of the ship, Nina's instructions to Merlin and the rescue of the Egyptian maid, and the awakening of the maid by Galahad at Arthur's court. This main text is followed by the pious angels' song, an orthodox commentary on the main narrative.

"The Egyptian Maid" begins with Merlin "pac[ing] the Cornish sands" as he spots a ship coming into view. Merlin is pleased with the sight, even more pleased as the vision becomes clear:

Upon this winged Shape so fair
Sage Merlin gazed with admiration:
Her lineaments, thought he, surpass
Aught that was ever shown in magic glass;
Was ever built with patient care;
Or, at a touch, produced by happiest transformation.

(PW 3:12–17)

While it is conventional to depict ships as feminine, Wordsworth here emphasizes gender. Utterly beautiful in "Shape" and "lineaments," the ship becomes the object of Merlin's insistent gaze. For a while Merlin is satisfied to gaze in admiration, but he eventually becomes jealous of this autonomous creation and wants to control it: "'My art shall tame her pride—'" (28). The pride Merlin attributes to the ship is an affront to his power. A conflict develops in which Merlin calls up a storm. The ship "wantonly [laves] / Her sides, the Wizard's craft confounding" (43–44), but finally Merlin succeeds in destroying her: "The storm has stripped her of her leaves; / The Lily floats no longer!—She hath perished" (53–54). Wordsworth depicts Merlin's action as a kind of sexual transgression, in which the ship is "stripped" and destroyed.

Throughout these stanzas, the narrator describes the ship as a beautiful creature, seemingly unaware of the danger she is in. In the manuscript, the lines "[Merlin] cast / An altered look upon the advancing Stranger" (24–25) had been "Full soon a sullen look he cast / Upon the bright unconscious Stranger." Wordsworth's use of "wantonly" in line 43 could suggest a lascivious or flirtatious quality, but it seems more likely to express the sportiveness of the "for ever fresh and young" (46) ship. In the dynamics of this scene the ship is more a victim of Merlin's "freakish will" (23) than a conscious enticer of his gaze.

Following this description, the narrator turns to the reader in an attempt to control the response to the episode:

Grieve for her, she deserves no less;
So like, yet so unlike, a living Creature!
No heart had she, no busy brain;
Though loved, she could not love again;
Though pitied, feel  her own distress;
Nor aught that troubles us, the fools of Nature.

(55–60)

By reminding us that the ship is not a living creature, the narrator paradoxically reinforces the episode as representing a human drama. Such a fate, the lines imply, can befall one who loves and feels.

In this opening episode the female remains powerless, prey to male destruction: both the ship and the maid are victims and no more. But Wordsworth soon subverts any sense of Merlin's invincibility. Merlin flees back into his cave, "repentant all too late" (69), sulking like a naughty boy who has gotten what he wants and still is not happy. Merlin's will dissolves before Nina, who descends upon him to explain the

consequences of his caprice. The scene is comic in its reversal of expectations: the powerful sorcerer remains silent as the Lady of the Lake chastises, explains, and instructs. Nina explains that the ship with the emblematic lily flower—"a sign of heathen power" (75)—was carrying a young princess who would renounce her heathen faith and marry a Christian from Arthur's court. While Nina goes off to find the sleeping beauty, Merlin pores over his books in search of a way to awaken her.

When Merlin brings the princess to Caerleon in a car pulled by swans, he accepts no responsibility for her fate. He simply explains to the court that she was the victim of a shipwreck. Indeed, he implicitly takes the credit for the rescue and suggests that it is he who will be able to wake the princess from her death-like sleep ("I, whose skill / Wafted her hither," 244–45). In reality, Nina is the power behind Merlin's posturing.

Nina controls the final moment when Galahad's touch awakens the princess. Although Galahad seems to be responsible, the narrator reveals that Nina has manipulated the denouement:

For late, as near a murmuring stream
He rested 'mid an arbour green and shady,
Nina, the good Enchantress, shed
A light around his mossy bed;
And, at her call, a waking dream
Prefigured to his sense the Egyptian Lady.

(301–6)

This passage evokes images of paradise—specifically, two scenes from Paradise Lost: Adam's dream (8:452–90), which Keats likens to the imagination (37, letter to Bailey, 22 November 1817), and Satan's disruption of Eve's sleep (5:28–95). Nina's prefigurative vision is all to the good here and leads directly to Galahad's success. Like the Adam of Keats's interpretation, Galahad awakens and finds truth; the princess awakens to a recreated paradise with the swans singing "Like sinless snakes in Eden's happy land" (323).

Arthur, unaware either of Merlin's guilt or of Nina's role, praises "God and Heaven's pure Queen" (342) for the happy union of the princess and Galahad. Arthur's orthodox Christian response foreshadows the eight-stanza angels' song that concludes the poem. But as the opening stanzas of that conclusion reveal, the angels' song adds a moralistic and judgmental commentary:

Who shrinks not from alliance
Of evil with good Powers
To God proclaims defiance,
And mocks whom he adores.
A Ship to Christ devoted
From the Land of Nile did go;
Alas! the bright Ship floated,
An Idol at her prow.
By magic domination,
The Heaven-permitted vent
Of purblind mortal passion,
Was wrought her punishment.

(355–66)

These lines misread the narrative, placing a narrowly moralistic interpretation on what had been a much more open and generous story. The stanzas are reminiscent of the glosses added to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which function less to clarify than to complicate. The angels see the ship as a mockery of God, because the "Idol" at her prow marks an unholy alliance with the Christian mission of the ship. The angels claim that Merlin was allowed to vent his "purblind mortal passion," by which means the ship "Was wrought her punishment" for carrying the Idol.

The contradictions of the angels' song, with its ambiguous and contorted syntax, bring the unresolved tensions in Wordsworth's supposedly carefree fantasy to the foreground. While it is true that the poem presents an easy dichotomy between heathen East and Christian West in the main narrative, the ship and the lotus carved on the prow are in fact represented in a much more positive way through Nina's eyes as she searches for the princess in the wrecked ship:

  Soon did the gentle Nina reach
  That Isle without a house or haven;
  Landing, she found not what she sought,
  Nor saw of wreck or ruin aught
  But a carved Lotus cast upon the beach
By the fierce walves, a flower in marble graven.

  Sad relique, but how fair the while!
  For gently each from each retreating
  With backward curve, the leaves revealed
  The bosom half, and half concealed,
  Of a Divinity, that seemed to smile
On Nina, as she passed, with hopeful greeting.

(121–32)

The goddess represented by the lotus is benevolent, certainly not the threatening idol described by the angels. Nina herself had explained that "a Goddess with a Lily flower" (76) was an emblem "Of joy immortal and of pure affection" (78).

Furthermore, in his note preceding the published poem, Wordsworth claims that "the Lotus, with the bust of the Goddess appearing to rise out of the full-blown flower, was suggested by the beautiful work of ancient art, once included among the Townley Marbles, and now in the British Museum" (PW 3:232). Wordsworth writes in the spirit of Keats standing before a Grecian urn, and not as a moralistic censor of pagan art. Add to that Wordsworth's love of the lotus or water lily, recorded by Isabella Fenwick: "This plant has been my delight from my boyhood, as I have seen it floating on the lake" (PW 3:502), and the angels' condemnation of the image of the lotus becomes even more suspect.

The angels' song is subtly connected to the politics of gender. In "The Egyptian Maid" Wordsworth evokes the kind of female power that Nina Auerbach identifies in Woman and the Demon— a "self-transforming power surging beneath apparent victimization"—for while he creates the passive sleeping beauty he sets another woman at the heart of her awakening.^[23] But Wordsworth is careful to identify Nina with virtue and benevolence, not with the sexually charged demonism that Auerbach finds in other sources. Nina rescues the sleeping "Damsel" (141) and carries her to Merlin for the journey to Caerleon. Heaven praises her action: "Thou hast achieved, fair Dame! what none / Less pure in spirit could have done" (153–54). But in the third part of the narrative Wordsworth deflects attention from Nina's powers, instead focusing on the awakening princess, who speaks not a word, and concluding with the angels' song.

Nina orchestrates the resolution, while men—particularly fathers and kings—prove ineffective. Arthur laments for the princess and her father, who has surrendered his daughter to Arthur's court as a reward for Arthur's freeing his realm from invaders. The poem centers on Arthur's lament for the maid, "Is this her piety's reward?" (214). Arthur feels responsible because of the vow he has made to her father, and he imagines the father's response:

"Rich robes are fretted by the moth;
Towers, temples, fall by stroke of thunder;
Will that, or deeper thoughts, abate
A Father's sorrow for her fate?
He will repent him of his troth;
His brain will burn, his stout heart split asunder.["]

(217–22)

Arthur remains as helpless to save the princess as was the ocean to save the ship: "But Ocean under magic heaves, / And cannot spare the Thing he cherished" (49–50). Like Tennyson's Arthur, Wordsworth's king is well-meaning and avuncular, but not in control.

Merlin, however, demonstrates a type of male power that seems both to fascinate and to repel Wordsworth. Just as Merlin observes the female ship, so does the poet-persona in Wordsworth's earlier sonnet "With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh" (1807; PW 3:18):

A goodly Vessel did I then espy
Come like a giant from a haven broad;
And lustily along the bay she strode,
Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.
The Ship was nought to me, nor I to her,
Yet I pursued her with a Lover's look.

In a letter written to Lady Beaumont about this sonnet, Wordsworth explains the way the mind of the perceiver focuses on this one ship out of the mass of ships at sea, follows the ship, and then lets it go (MY 1:145–51). What Wordsworth and later critics of the sonnet have not noted is the metaphorical structure in which the poet-persona is a lover pursuing this impressive feminine object, who strides "lustily along the bay." On the metapoetic level this is a Petrarchan love sonnet about the poetic process—the male poet identifies the object of his desire but his gaze cannot hold her in place: "She will brook / No tarrying." The poet's control is limited, and the object exists in the poem as a fleeing presence. She has not been tamed.^[24]

In "The Egyptian Maid," the object's beauty and independence threaten Merlin's sovereignty, so he exerts his will over her. In attempting to appropriate the ship, he destroys it through his transgression. While the poet-persona of the sonnet merely records Merlin's failure to hold the object, in fact Merlin betrays the potentially destructive power of the artist's gaze, in much the same way that in many of his poems Browning reveals what Carol T. Christ has called the "transgressive impulse" of the male artist.^[25]

From his earliest poems, Wordsworth recognized the dangers of the desire for appropriation. Ambivalence about the psychic costs of conquest and domination, for instance, appears in "Nutting" (1798), a poem about transgressive male power often cited in feminist readings of Wordsworth.^[26] We recall that in "Nutting" the "sweet mood" (39) abruptly ends:

… Then up I rose,
And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash
And merciless ravage: and the shady nook
Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,
Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up
Their quiet being …

(43–48)

In "Nutting" the boy "sall[ies] forth" (5) as an invader of the bower of romance, a questing hero disturbed by a recognition of his own power into a discovery of otherness. Considering the violence of this action and imagery, it is no wonder that Wordsworth did not include this poem in The Prelude, the narrative of his life, even though thematically it fits with the boat-stealing episode as a haunting transgression.

What distinguishes Merlin in "The Egyptian Maid" from other transgressors is that Wordsworth makes him a comic character who creates mischief and then sulks back into his cave. The drama of "Nutting" is transformed in "The Egyptian Maid" by debunking humor, a transformation that resembles the difference between Laodamia as imagined by Virgil, on the one hand, and by Ovid, on the other. Wordsworth also counters Merlin's transgression with Nina's restorations. Although all would be chaos without Nina, her role is concealed to preserve the illusion of male power. Wordsworth, then, writes a poem that upholds the pieties of his time but also reveals how the masculine world is secretly held together by women. What a remarkable poem for the poet of Rydal Mount to imagine: a powerful and competent woman bringing order to the mess caused by sulking magicians and ineffectual kings. Perhaps this is Wordsworth's oblique way of coming to terms with the women who have created his household and made his poetic career possible. And perhaps, too, Wordsworth knew it: the playfulness of the poem allows him to let down his guard as he praises not masculine power but the feminine beauty embodied by the lotus and the princess. And not just beauty and delicacy, but strength. I also see a kind of self-deprecating humor in "The Egyptian Maid" that reminds us of the poet laughing himself to scorn at the end of "Resolution and Independence." The playfulness, however, masks a serious concern with the roles of father and daughter.

But the poem succeeded with readers who saw it as a simple male-centered romance, with no regard for the role of Nina. One reviewer enthusiastically proclaimed that "The lady revives, and the knight is blest," concluding that after reading "The Egyptian Maid" he could say that

"The days of chivalry are not yet gone, while such poems are produced." In this review from Fraser's Magazine 11 (June 1835), the poem becomes a simple tale of Merlin's ingenuity and Arthur's chivalry: a perfect patriarchal fantasy.