She Awoke and Found It Truth: Cinematic Appropriations of Engendered Subjectivity in John Keats's Eve of St. Agnes and in Jane Campion's Bright Star

This paper explores how in Bright Star (Campion 2009), a cinematic rendition of the final years of John Keats's life, filmmaker Jane Campion exploits Keats's love affair with Fanny Brawne to reconstruct the poet's rhetoric of the imagination reflected in the dream sequence in his poem The Eve of St. Agnes. Although Keats perceives the ideal poetic character as a 'chameleon poet' (letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818) 1-one who can adopt both male and female subject positions-I contend that The Eve of St. Agnes is largely grounded in the poet's gendered identity. Allusions to the poem in Bright Star-a film governed by a female point of view-are thus examined as calling attention to engendered subjectivity vis-a-vis authorship and spectatorship. I focus on the dream sequence to illustrate Campion's visualization of these engendered subject positions from the female point of view. To this end, I employ psychoanalytic and feminist film theories in my readings of the dream sequence and its cinematic allusions.