Hemans’s Records of Woman and the Eternity of Female Suffering

Chapter seven shows Felicia Hemans’s Records of Woman as crystallising the female problem with eternity. Hemans shows that female suffering and female existence is inextricably bound. Eternity is shunted to one side in favour of everlastingness: this is not a choice but the only option meted out to women. Hemans, though focused on the personal ephemeral experiences of the everyday, trains an eye upon eternity, where instead of an imagined utopia, Hemans remains anchored to the eternal and unchanging fate of women as detailed through each of her poems that constitute Records of Woman. Imprisoned within a shared fate, Hemans’s women form a sorority of suffering that insists on female lives as following an unalterable form. Hemans’s reveals that for women such an understanding of eternity as duration can only amount to suffering. For the female poet, eternity is barred from view: only everlastingness remains.