ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a description of the visual complexity to introduce Charlotte Turner Smith's major strategies for making women's melancholic suffering visible in not just these, but in all ninety-two of the Elegiac Sonnets. With her depiction of women's melancholic suffering, Smith also claims literary authority. As Smith attempted to contrast her authentic suffering with the man of sensibility's affectation, a tension arose between her publicly expressed troubles and the creation of a melancholic mood in her poetry. Ventriloquizing other poets, as she does Pope, is one of three major strategies Smith employs in the Elegiac Sonnets to emphasize the melancholic's combination of emotion and reason. Smith draws on her culture's interest in visuality both to demonstrate the authenticity of her individual suffering and also to overcome gendered restrictions on expressing melancholia. Smith wants both to gain sympathy for her suffering and also to preserve her rational, actively perceptive subjectivity.
