The Farmer's Bride

Background Information

• Charlotte Mew lived through World War one.
• She witnessed the beginning of woman's suffrage, and died in 1928; the year when woman achieved total suffrage in England.
• She was the daughter of an architect; middle class.
• Before the Liberal Reforms and Welfare State.
• Her father died in the 1890s, leaving her family (made up of her sister and mother) very poor.
• Writing may well have been a viable way of creating income.
• Two of her siblings were diagnosed as insane and put into a mental institute.
• Charlotte and her sister Anne made a pact never to marry, so that they didn't pass their insanity on to their children. This mental illness may have been homosexuality.
• Suspected to be a lesbian, because of 'dandy' fashion (a woman with masculine fashion). Homosexuality was illegal in this time.

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What This Says About The Poem

• Message of supporting woman's rights, disapproving of a society that limits women.
• Awareness of mental illness.
• Negative view towards marriage.
• Potentially negative view towards men.

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Interpretations

Is the woman symbolic for all woman in Victorian society? Is the farmhouse a microcosm of society?

Is the woman symbolic for insane woman in Victorian society? Her reactions are unnatural; she is locked away as many women were locked in asylums. She is dehumanized through animal imagery; suggesting that views on mental illness were cruel. This makes the farmhouse the asylum, and the farmer a warden.

Is the farmer's exploitation of nature an extended metaphor for the world becoming more industrial at the expense of nature?

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Perspective

The poem is definitely NOT written in Mew's perspective. It's written from the male's, to present a viewpoint that she disagrees with.

She could not portray the viewpoint of the bride, as someone of her gender and sataus would have no voice in her society (perhaps suggested how women had no voice in politics; how the mentally ill were not listened to, etc). The biased male perspective was the only one available to judge, and Mew makes it purposely biased.

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Language Features

Dialect - Portrays the setting; may also be used to make the narrator look uneducated or unappealing, unintelligent (perhaps, much like males as a whole in that society).

Semantic field of nature/animals - Suggests that women are closer connected to nature than men, who wish to trap it and confine it. 'Shy as a leveret', 'sweet as the first wild violets'. It may just be farming terminology, to portray someone who wishes to exploit nature. To link to the interpretations, perhaps the man is trying to take the woman's nature away from her; or the warden is trying to take the natural freedom out of the asylum patient. 

The Title - Still named 'the farmer's bride' rather than wife; this language is used to suggest that she did not become his woman after marriage, and has not changed since her wedding day. Her name is unknown to the point where she is only identified as the…