Summary Of The Immigrants By Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Smith was an English Romantic poet and novelist. She introduced a renewal of the English sonnet, helped build the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels. Charlotte Smiths’ “The Emigrants” is a classic poem due to its stanza form and book-length, though it by no means complies with the conventions of the form. “The Emigrants” uncovers the contradictions and shortcomings essential in dominant late‐eighteenth‐century, especially in the French Revolution. However, she applies the personal pronoun “I,” thus associating her own personal circumstances. Smith was completely consciousness of her departure from poems generic form and that she does so in order to appoint a new perspective: that of the misery, sorrow and more specifically that of women.
While some may read this as a self-humiliation comment (Smith characterizes her own hand as “feeble” and “feminine”), it also allows for Smith to move away from the “bow” or masculine outlining of epical and instead work on her own terms. Smith starts out from literary conventions in her use of “I,” in her gendering of war as masculine, Liberty and Freedom as feminine, and finally in her use of the mother, in order to demonstrate a reading that merges revolutionary politics and gender politics. Smith creates a controversial argument, sympathetic antiwar poem that moves beyond the troubles of the actual emigrants from Revolutionary France, and thus evoking the “war of the