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詩人 L. S. ベヴィントン |
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L. S. ベヴィントン バイオグラフィー＆ビブリオグラフィー (4) |
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A Life of Louisa Sarah Bevington
By. Eijun Senaha Hokkaido University |
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What, with this fenced human mind,
What can I do to help my kind?
I such a stammerer, they so blind! --- “My Little Task” (1882) |
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The angry and helpless poet indicates that this is not the only case of child abuse nor is it the first time.
In fact, the abuse has been repeated as “your patient spirit bore/ Its wrong in secret.”
Bevington suggests that the abuse is not merely verbal and physical, but quite possibly sexual abuse on a young girl.
Bevington’s literary expression of the hymen indicates the violation of virginity: “what love of mine can ever mend/ Again for you
the veil your tyrant tore?” The subject can be wife abuse as well: the tyrannizing husband enslaves the young wife as he
symbolically tears an image of romantic marriage, the “veil” worn by the bride. Bevington’s choice of using the traditionally
courtly sonnet form, therefore, may be an ironical statement about unpredictable domestic relationships. Aesthetically,
it is also ironic, as Bevington confesses in “The poet’s Tear,” that human suffering is the source of art, but she can at
least take a little sword of strange new metal in order to express its agonies in the form of art: “I cannot cure; I may in part express.”
Bevington’s accusation of personal and social injustices are vehemently repeated in such poems as
“The Unpardonable Sin” and “Hated.” Like “How Do I Know?” in which Bevington ironically describes a marital discord
where the husband holds all the power over the wife, “Bees in Clover” is another poem Bevington addresses to “a wife-shriek”
in order to “Help the woman bear her fetter” so that “the woman shall be free.” An allegorical expression of this poem is Bevington’s
new aesthetic technique and continues to develop in her next publication. Her philosophical poems, such as “The Valley of
Remorse” and “The Pessimist” and “Three,” also deserve attention. Soon after the publication of this volume,
she left England and married in Germany in 1883. Too little is known about her marriage, but her attitudes toward marriage and man
in her poems and essays are so dark that they may have reflected her private life.
Meanwhile, in the 1880s and 90s, London was in the midst of socialist and trade union movements,
and anarchism was also drawing attention from the public for its utopian goal. Women were also involved: Edith Nesbit helped Beatrice
and Sidney Webb found the Fabian Society in 1884, and Charlotte Wilson was elected to be the only woman of the first executive committee of
the Fabians. In 1886, Wilson also cofounded an anarchist journal Freedom, which she continued to edit until 1901. In 1894,
William Michael Rossetti’s children, or nieces and nephews of Christina, started Torch, that was continued as Torch of Anarchy
after 1895. Returning to London’s literary stage in about 1890, Bevington met Wilson and became a vocal activist, leaning her ideology
more strongly toward anarchism. Her personal experiences and ideologies befitted what the anarchists justified as their
cause many social ills of British Imperialism. She started publishing a series of articles in various anarchist journals,
as well as lecturing at the Autonomie club on atheism and Christianity.
In 1893, her inflammatory article “Dynamitism” ridiculed a Christian lady’s accusation that anarchism may
well be called Dynamitism. This article ultimately proved that Bevington herself had become a strong advocate of an anarchist terrorism:
“Dynamitism is the bringing ‘not of peace but a sword as a reply to the ‘scribes, pharisees, and hypocrites’ who prate of
‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” Bevington concludes, “Meanwhile, dynamite is a last and very valuable resource,
and as such not to be wasted on side issues.” In May 1894, “Why I Am an Expropriationist” was issued as a pamphlet, in a series
which included William Morris’s “Why I Am a Communist” in the same issue and George Bernard Shaw’s “Why I Am a Social Democrat”
in the other. The article reveals her sympathies with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s attack on property-ownership, as Leighton and Reynolds
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Here Bevington takes a straightforwardly Proudhonian line that ‘property holding is
an abuse in itself’ and argues for a society in which government has been banished and all goods are held in common.
Characteristically, the romantic and primitivist ideals of anarchism overwhelm the practical realities of social organization.
The self-evident injustices and evils of late Victorian England, regularly exposed in all the anarchist journals, provided sufficient
justification for an extremist, utopian goal. |
Her “utopian goal” may have triggered a terrorist action: a suspected anarchist blew himself
up while carrying a bomb towards the Greenwich Observatory in February of the same year, (the incident which inspired Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent). It is not clear how deeply she was involved with the incident, but, as one of her letters was quoted to prove
that the culprit had been set up by the police, she was not a mere bystander. Nevertheless, despite the possibility of criminal indictment,
she wrote another agitative article for Torch in October, concluding “Demos! Where’s our Dynamite?”
In 1895, at the age of fifty, the ailing Bevington was still active. She managed to publish
two articles on property in James Tochatti’s “Liberty” Press and Chiefly A Dialogue: Concerning Some Difficulties of a Dunce in Wilson’s
“Freedom” Office. As a poet, Bevington published the third and last collection of poems from “Liberty” Press.
Liberty Lyrics, though three of fifteen poems were reprints from previously published anarchist journals, is probably
the best balanced volume in terms of her representation of aestheticism and knowledge of religion, evolutionism, and
anarchism, all of which led her to the stance of revolutionist. In the first poem “The End of the World,” Bevington declares that
“the end of the world is here,” using a cosmic metaphor to describe the apocalyptic 1890s: “Our round earth planet?
Ah, no;/ The planet shall roll, and the great sun stand.” An astronomical fact reflects the political instability
of the planet earth. “Looking Dawnwards” is a modernistic poem in which she looks back to the history of anarchists and
reconfirms their ideology: |
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Free to live and have my being--
Free to choose or deprecate;
Free to keep law or to mend it,
Free to recognize my mate.
Free, by all consent around me;
Free by all consent within;
Free from human rule and precept;
Free from human hurt and sin.
Very gently will I take it,
Very careful will I be,
Lest the crucified and wistful
Miss their chance, in vain, through me. |
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