ABSTRACT
In 1784, Charlotte Smith published her first book of poetry, Elegiac Sonnets, partly as a wifely response to her husband's need: Benjamin Smith, ever the profligate husband, finally contracted enough debt to land himself in prison, and Smith's publication was a money-making venture. The development of proto-psychological tools and theories in the nineteenth century uniformly followed the given that men and women occupied emotional territory as separate as their social spheres. Whether because of her tendency to hysteria, to melancholy, to lust, to chastity, to heat, to coolness, to earthliness, to angelicalness, woman provided the disorder against which men defined their own order. Having placed mothers on the boundary, having relentlessly defamiliarized the familiar spectacle of hearth and home, Smith embeds in 'The Emigrants' a further critique: a horror of war becomes a horror of culture itself. Mary Favret has argued that 'in the context of home, family, and friends, the outsider/woman occupies the central position'.
