Among Monsters. III. Isabella: The Decaying Romance. IV. The Dream Realized on The Eve of St. Agnes. V. Concluding Remarks

III. Isabella: The Decaying Romance
In his most negatively reviewed romance of the 1820 trilogy, Keats tells the love story of Lorenzo and Isabella. It was written before the other two poems, in 1818, but comes second, after Lamia, in the volume. Although he was mainly criticized negatively for “copying” the tale from one of Giovanni Boccaccio’s stories in Decameron, from the fifth novel of the fourth day, called Lisabetta and the pot of basil, in Isabella Keats mostly focuses on creating a parody of “old romance” and on criticizing the commercialization of love and marriage. The poet does not hide that he has borrowed Boccaccio’s tale, since he makes a direct apostrophe to its original creator in his poem: “Oh eloquent and famed Boccaccio!” (line145). However, this did not discourage the critics from comparing his work to the original. An anonymous reviewer, for instance, wrote in the British Critic simply that the “tale is from Boccaccio, and possesses less merit;” (qtd. in Schwartz 265). A less biased and more careful examination of the poem, though, would uncover a much more detailed version of Boccaccio’s story, in which the characters’ emotions are captured with remarkable accuracy and intensity while the flaws of “old Romance” are subtly exposed. The setting of a seemingly classic romance is gradually stripped off its conventions to reveal oppression and malice, as depicted in an after-all “new romance” poem (Wolfson 287). Keats’s contemporaries saw Isabella as a “weak-sided”, plain and sentimental poem that has not got “the luxury of description” (qtd. in Schwartz 261), and viewed Boccaccio’s tale “in some respects superior to Mr. Keats’s attempt” (qtd. in Schwartz 204), but failed to notice the realistic details in the romance poem. Specifically, they failed to see the “inadequacies of romance expressed in Isabella” (Stillinger 43). Unlike Lamia, in Isabella it is not the lovers who experience flawed emotions; their enemy is flawed society again, but this time as an external factor that affects privatized romance. The problems addressed in Isabella, more specifically, are the commodification of the institution of marriage, the elitist attitude of the
upper class towards lower class, and the patriarchal constrictions that men and women had to face when their romance was not socially accepted. Isabella is an example that romance can be experienced as a sickness when society interferes. Despite the extreme sentiment and the gothic elements that add to the fictional aspect of the poem, Keats exposes an underlying reality that allows poetic imagination to make contact with the physical world.
After Lorenzo’s delayed expression of love for Isabella, the lovers are enjoying sheer bliss only when they are with one another at a private place where there is no meddling on the part of society. This privatization of their love affair seems to be the only thing that can keep it secure from narrow-class prejudices. Romance remains pure only when it stays away from the corruption of the public world (Watkins 56). More specifically, the enemy of this romance turns out to be commercial wealth. Lorenzo is a working-class employee of Isabella’s wealthy brothers, who Keats refers to “As two close Hebrews in that land inspired” (line 131). The two merchants are also described as “money-bags” that could not “see east or west” (142). Being a poet of humble origins who strived to get a place among the great high-class poets of his time, Keats uses the social prejudice about Hebrews’ measuring everything by gain to implicitly refer to the elitism of high class that he had to struggle against himself. According to Daniel P. Watkins, from this perspective Isabella and Lorenzo’s relationship “might be regarded as a utopian impulse, a search for bliss that denies the shaping influence of oppressive economic reality”, (58). This “utopian bliss” however, is not likely to survive in Keats’s poetic reality, because it cannot remain pure and separate from society’s interference.
Once the romantic affair between their sister and their employee is discovered, Isabella’s brothers decide to take matters in their hands in order to make sure that their sister will marry “To some high noble and his olive- trees” (line 168). From that moment on Isabella turns into a gothic ballad, according to Diane Long Hoeveler, infused with melancholy, disease, and death (330, 331). The brothers are so blinded by their materialist
motives that they lure Lorenzo deep in a forest and kill him. Hoeveler observes that “Lorenzo becomes for Keats a Christ-like poet, sacrificed by narrow-class prejudices and condemned to live on in mutated form only after his premature death” (328). Society’s “invasion” in the romance turns out to be destructive for Keats. Isabella’s lack of autonomy and incapacity to react to what has happened could be viewed as the capitalist brothers’ privilege to get away with any kind of crime because of their status and money.
Keats writes an anti-capitalist poem that exposes all the suffering and problems that are caused by public obsession with materialism and wealth. Isabella’s brothers are the epitome of capitalist snobbery as they turn out to be cold-blooded killers that sacrifice their sister’s happiness in the name of “ancestral merchandize” (line 106). Perhaps, according to Marlon Ross “we could say that the world’s disease contaminates the quest for participatory, innocent love …” (119). Keats implicitly hints to the commercialization of romance in his time. It was common to arrange marriages between families rather than between individuals. Isabella and Lorenzo’s love is condemned because of her brothers’ meddling with their affair. They do not take into account their sister’s feelings, but choose to “sell” her to some “noble- man”. They are the puppeteers that control everything and everyone. The narrator of the poem, in stanza XVI, wonders with exasperation:
Why were they proud? Because their marble founts Gush’d with more pride than do a wretch’s tears?- Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs?-
Why were they proud? Because red-lin’d accounts Were richer than the songs of Grecian years?-
Why were they proud? Again we ask aloud,
Why in the name of Glory were they proud? (121-128)

The agonizing repetition of the question along with the hyperboles that follow in answer to it amount to an increasing anger on the part of the narrator, who seems to be unable to find good enough a reason to justify the cruelty that sprang from the brothers’ contempt for Isabella’s affair with Lorenzo. The burial of Lorenzo’s head in the pot is translated by Hoeveler as the burying of low-class by capitalist society (328). Keats implicitly makes a statement against the devouring British capitalist system that reflects once again his Cockney campaign for sociopolitical reform. By placing the couple at the forefront as protagonists of the romance who are tortured and killed by the mishandlings and pettiness of class prejudices, Keats invokes our sympathetic feelings for Lorenzo and Isabella which result in our perception of

them as “same” in contrast to the capitalist brothers who are seen as “other” (Hoeveler 328). Keats exposes the flaws of capitalist society of the early nineteenth century by placing it against his readers’ sympathy for the main characters of the poem. Our nurtured feelings of sympathy that emerge out of the workings of our imagination help realize that “poetry
becomes an experience of discovery, an inward –turning awareness …” (D’Avanzo 8). In the case of Isabella it is an awareness of society’s impact on pure romance, and of the pain and “sickness” it may inflict upon innocent lovers.
From the beginning of the poem we see that Lorenzo is placed at a humble position in his desperate quest for Isabel’s love. Keats describes him from the second line as “a young palmer in Love’s eye!” (2). Traditional gender roles are subverted through Lorenzo’s character in two ways. The first is by placing the male lover in an inferior and infantilised position towards a higher-status woman (Hoeveler 326). Secondly Keats attributes to Lorenzo
common “feminine” traits by creating an overly emotional and sensitive lover. When the story
opens, both lovers seem to be suffering a state of misery and agony, pining away from each other. Suffering seems to be a central theme of the poem. Lorenzo, though deeply in love with Isabella, appears to be almost irrationally hesitant to profess his love, which points to “effeminacy” of character for a lover of that time. In the fourth stanza, Keats describes the two lovers’ thoughts:
“Tomorrow I will bow to my delight, Tomorrow will I ask my lady’s boon.” ‘Oh may I never see another night,
Lorenzo, if thy lips breathe not love’s tune.’ So spake they to their pillows; but, alas,
Honeyless days and days did he let pass (27-32)

Lorenzo is greatly anxious over professing his love, which leads to a procrastination that is painful for both lovers. Even when he finally plucks up the courage to express his love, Keats describes that: “Fevered his high conceit of such a bride, Yet brought him to the meekness of a child” (45-46). Lorenzo’s procrastination and “meekness of a child” allude to “effeminate” behavior and infantilization that confirms his inferior position. The parallel drawn between Lorenzo’s character and infancy allude to the character’s desperate need for a female nurturer, which will be discussed further down. The ambivalent nature of Lorenzo’s character can also be observed later on after he is killed and has become an apparition, as he is referred to as “it” by the narrator of the poem: “Its eyes though wild, were still all dewy bright/ With love, and kept all phantom fear aloof” (289-290). Keats appears to be establishing a space where his frustration with standard male performance of gender can be expressed and remain

uncontaminated by society. Lorenzo is like an outcast that seems to have no place in society as a “he” and is free to occupy a blurred and fluid position as “it” after his death.
The commodification of women by patriarchy and capitalist systems regardless of their own status was seen as a kind of “disease” by Keats, which could be confirmed through the gradual state of sickness that Isabella seems to be sinking in after Lorenzo’s death.Isabella becomes sick with depression and melancholy after Lorenzo’s death and turns into a nurturer of his corpse when his apparition reveals to her where he has been buried. Isabella amputates his head and puts it in a pot covered with basil, so she can keep him with her forever. Romance is now experienced as a ghastly disease due to both Isabella’s psychological damage and to the “sick” treatment of Lorenzo’s corpse. Isabella is driven to a state of insanity, at which she keeps nourishing Lorenzo’s head with her tears:
And so she fed it with thin tears,
Whence thick and green and beautiful it grew, So that it smelt more balmy than its peers
Of basil- tufts in Florence; for it drew
Nurture besides, and life, from human tears (425- 429)

Isabella has withdrawn again from the world, this time to nurture the basil covering her dead lover’s head that grows with her tears. She feels like she is nurturing Lorenzo back to life. The lovers’ inability to stay apart even after death suggests a pathological need for each other that cannot survive separation. This becomes even clearer at the end of the poem when the brothers steal Isabella’s pot and being unable to handle the loss of her beloved twice, Isabella dies.

The female character’s reaction to Lorenzo’s death turns out to be a rather defeatist one. Despite the fact that she knows that her brothers are Lorenzo’s murderers, she does not react against them or plan any kind of revenge as one would expect, but simply withdraws to a submissive and quiet state, gradually withering away from life. Isabella’s silent mourn is a cry for help that neither her brothers nor anyone else notice and respond to. Isabella turns out to be the most passive and submissive character of the story, despite her high status. Her sorrow and mishandling of it turn out to be her own disaster. In a letter to his friend Charles Brown, written in September 1819, Keats writes to him about his convictions regarding woes in life, referring to them as “grievances” in this case. He says:
Real grievances are displacers of passions. The imaginary [grievances] nail a man down for a sufferer, as on a cross; the real spur him up into an agent (Forman 397)
Isabella’s sorrow is “imaginary” in this case, because it has her “nailed” to a passive state from which she cannot escape. Normally, after such a discovery about her lover’s murder we would expect her to take action and punish her brothers, but instead she lets her sorrow overwhelm and paralyze her completely. As we saw earlier, for Keats surrendering to passions and imagination is a cause of destruction and therefore Isabella’s death from withering sorrow is expected by the readers. Isabella’s passivity hints to the frequent oppression for obedience to men and patriarchal rules that women had to face, and is further enhanced by her subsequent death as the ultimate defeat of the female.
In a way, the death of the “female” in the poem evokes Keats’s own “Gordian complications” about his feelings towards women. On the one hand it could represent the satisfaction of his animosity against them, while on the other hand it could also reflect his identification with women and the oppression he experienced because of the patriarchal
system that compromised the lives of both men and women. His aggression and sympathy are expressed simultaneously enhancing thus the gender ambivalence that permeates the poem.Furthermore, the male lover can also be read as a representation of a Cockney poet and mostly a model that closely resembles Keats. His “humble” class origin compared to Isabella’s brothers alludes to the personal exclusion and rejection that Keats experienced from high class poets of his time. The depreciation of Lorenzo’s labor also retraces the reviewers’ and high – class poets’ failure to recognize the value of Keats’s poetical works. In other words, Lorenzo represents an unconventional male figure that falls prey to the elitist behavior of patriarchal models of masculinity in his time. After all, he exhibits traits of “effeminate” behavior that also tie in with Keats’s reputed “effeminacy” of character. According to Mellor Keats is “a man prone to occupying the position of woman in life or in discourse, or by blurring the distinction between genders” (238). Both Keats and Lorenzo experience the constrictions that capitalism and patriarchy impose and society’s lack of tolerance when it comes to the alternative performance of gender.
Taking into account Lorenzo’s inferiority because of his class-origin and his effeminate character combined with Isabella’s inferiority because of her sex, we can perceive them as symbol for female in contrast to the capitalist brothers who can be seen as controlling males in patriarchal system. The brothers are the characters in power in the poem while Lorenzo and Isabella turn out to be puppets in their hands. The couple’s feminization and implied female inferiority and repression, can be experienced by the readers through their capacity for sympathy. This merging of the female character with the male lover into a more “effeminate” but still fluid identity constitutes a state of in-betweenness. Keats manages to blur the line between masculinity and femininity again by making the couple seem as if they are of the same gender; a gender ambiguous that cannot be defined by name, but through
shared feelings, traits and experiences. This gender-merging though cannot survive in the conservative society that Isabella and Lorenzo are part of.
The poem turns into a “wormy circumstance”, (line 385), after Lorenzo’s death. For Keats however this is inevitable as pleasure cannot be experienced separate from pain. The detailed expression of emotion that describes Isabella and Lorenzo’s love gives way to a wordy expression of mournful sentiments and sickness. “Pain and sorrow and inextricably woven into the texture of life”, according to Bate, and in order to understand both joy and suffering it is essential that we experience it (36). In a letter to his brother George in 1819, Keats writes that “[n]othing ever becomes real till it is experienced” (Forman 316). Keats’s illustrations of the lovers’ love and sorrow through language evoke sympathetic feelings to the reader, which however can never be felt as real. According to Jack Stillinger: “one accepts the inseparability of pleasure and pain, or one rejects life entirely, and suffers a kind of moral and spiritual emptiness amounting to death” (551). Isabella and Lorenzo would have never have experienced the great love for each other without the risk of losing it and suffering because of it.