The Farmer’s Bride, Charlotte Mew

• Context


  Thought to be gay, dressed in male attire, challenged gender divide

  • Comments on rigid gender roles (e.g. women having a domestic role) and the distance it

  creates

  Bride is too young, not her choice to marry - Victorian society, patriarchal system
• ‘Frightened fay’ ‘like a hare/mouse’ ‘shy as a leveret’


  compared to small vulnerable

  animals, harsh fricative alliteration (violent objectification)
• ‘Turned afraid // of love and me and all things human’ 


  syndetic listing: disrupts rhythm -

  dysfunctional relationship
• ‘We chased her’ ‘caught her, fetched her home at last’ 


  treated as prey, hunted down
• ‘But what to me?’

  rq, selfish nature, doubts her commitment to him
• ’Tis but a stair Betwixt us.’


  enjambment + caesura = frustration at unresolved distance
• ‘Her hair, her hair!’


  frantic repetition, possessiveness
• ‘The brown, the brown of her’ 


  colour imagery - can’t see beyond appearance,

  superficiality
• Dramatic monologue, irregular rhyme + caesura

  punctuation manipulates rhythm -

  frustration and emotional overwhelm of relationship
• Themes and comparisons


  Porphyria’s lover: controlling and possessive speakers (vulnerable lover, doubts

  commitment), dramatic monologue shows imbalanced relationships, resort to violence, intimate night vs distance, painful ending vs fulfilled