Reading 'Stars'

By Richard Dyer

• Stars only have ideological power rather than being able to actually do anything
• Despite being elite they don't excite envy as there is the belief that anyone can become one
• Demand for stars is constant as opposed to demand for genres or even stories
• Carl Laemmle in the St Louis Post Despatch
• Already stars in vaudeville - people expected from entertainment
• Stars are images of media texts and therefore products of the film industry

Economics wise...

• They are a form of capital possesed by studios and help Hollywood studio's monopoly as they are usually in major studio's films etc
• Act as a guarantee of investment
• Cost a lot so must be handled carefully
• Used to sell films
• Used to organize the market
• Protect from story or acting
• Problematic neccessity but are not necessary or sufficient for a film's success
• Help create a standardised product similar to any other business
• Aesthetic importance - centre of film, star image

Development of the star system broke the MPPC's hold on the film industry, but they have also saved film companies/battled with introduction of TV.

But they do not guarantee a successful film. The public's opinion and interest in them shifts.

Manipulation...

• Time, money and energy spent building up images
• Manipulation of advertising
• Perpetuation of star stereotype is important - publicist must fit role in
• Star is merchandise intended for mass consumption
• Pseudo-events - appear to be meaningful but aren't (Daniel Boorstein)
• Culture merely reproduces the status quo whereas previously it has pointed out an other
• Artists, rebels, whores etc were the precursors to stars, star characters act very differently as they serve as an affirmation rather than negation of the established order

But

• Not all stars make it eg Anna Sten
• There is content to star images other than appearance
• Humans have to deccode star images

Fashion...

• ultimate in manipulation due to its superficiality
• Stars fix a type of beauty
• Define norms of physical attractiveness
• Change in physical style indicates social change
• See Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne Bubolz Eicher

The Film Medium...

• Inherent to it that makes stars? eg CUs, more intimate medium, captures uniqueness
• Theatre star process intensified
• Did the CU lead to the 'discovery of the human face?' Bela Balazs
• But how we read facial expressions is dependent on editing, lighting higlighting features, iconography/artistic, cultural
• Stars go beyond a particular character or play - performer more important than role
• Not inherent to film but inherent to cinematic institutions
• Have hero figures that save the world been replaced by those that just enjoy the fruits of the world? 'The Triumph of Mass Idols'
• Aesthetic of realism - foregrounds their personality

Talent?

• Ideally have Photogenic and striking looks, acting ability, presence on camera, charm, personality, sex-appeal, attractive voice and bearing
• Skill at being a certain sort of person or image

Phenomenon of consumption?

• Empahsis on filmmakers who cause stars to exist
• Star/audience relationships not based on sexual attraction as fave star is often same gender as you - homosexuality as taboo but cinema provides way of expression
• Emotional affinity and self-identification lead to imitation
• Imitation turns to projection when it becomes more than mimicking appearance and behaviours like hair and kissing - use star as a way of dealing with reality
• Audience's role in shaping star phenomon is limited

Characters (in the novelistic form):

1. particularity - uniqueness
2. interest - acknowledgement of individuality, characteristics as good in themselves, plurality of beliefs and values
3. autonomy - no longer just representations of ideas, must appear to be more than just part of plot, unaware of characters's construction
4. roundness - mulitplicity of traits
5. development - should change
6. interiority
7. motivation
8. discrete identity
9. consistency

• Must be unique but empathizable
• bourgeois concept of character condemns collectivity and typical people and is deeply concerned with individual interior motivation
• fiction legitimizes emotions and aspirations, transmits norms
• individual masking ideological conception of character
• Star images are often types
• both normative in respect to social types and individualated
• Stars usually have proper names rather than emblematic ones
•  notion of 'manipulation' tends to undercut the autonomy of the star
• Star images do not have to change unlike novelistic characters - change can sometimes end in box-office failure though some do change or deepen but must have some consistency
• sameness becomes the overriding feauture
• because stars are always in different films playing different characters the star must stay the same
• stars ambition and success are shown to be rooted in their psychology but they are also shown as passive consumers
• stars are supremely figures of identification which is acheived in relation to social types
• 
  

Extras!

• Film has become more focused on character instead of plot - plot often illuminates elements of characters
• tomboys - ok to want to be superior sex but not the other way round
• men as history women as ahistoric and eternal
• secondary charecters tend to be types

Reading Keats's Nausea

Qoute from Keats: 'Perhaps I eat to persuade myself I am somebody'

• Elizabeth bishop 'unpleasanst insistence on the palate'
• Carlyle 'hungering after sweets which he can't get, going about saying "I'm so hungry; I would so like something pleasant!"
• Helen Vendler thinks his obsession with gustatory taste shows vigourously taken pleasure
• Mrjorie levenson thinks shows dysfunctional aestitic attitude
• poetical character defined by ability to taste and relish
• it is body that tastes and can experience pleasure from it
• consumptive body - consumes itself starved to death
• when dying 'his stomach - not a single thing will digest' 'distended stomach keeps in perpetual hunger or craving' 'ghastly wasting away of his body and extremities'
• if self definition is matters of taste than to be driven by hunger is to lose pretensions of taste
• kant ' people with a healthy appetite relish everything, so long as it is something they can eat... only when men have got all they want can we tell who... has taste or not'
• legendary chameleon feeds on air
• couldn't besustained on transcendental food
• existing in the world of aesthetics made him modernistly nauseous in the real one?
• He bases the apprectiation of beauty on 'allegories of taste'
• In 'La belle dame sans merci' his allegory begins to founder upon real hunger
• Hyperion's character becomes sick because of  
• Gorging self on beauty
• restricted economy of consumption defines taste
• In Paradise Lost death is hungry and has a predator's sense of smell
• smell has always been linked to bodily senses of taste rather than the more intellectual/higher of vision/hearing
• smell brings you down to animal level but can also be gourmet
• is death a creature of discrimination or taste and is he of substance/body
• Does death function as  an abstraction of hunger as coleridge believes
• However when you consume something it ceases to exist - aesthetic consumption?
• Creativity like preying bird 'gull'
• Keats's gorging allows poet to sublimate his identity into poetical character
• Keats's adverse to recognising unidealizable hunger underpinning creation
• Predatory hunger at core of creation - food chains - Keats saw no escape from cycle of fierce destruction
• mortal nature's carnivinous consumption makes it unable to be aesthcicised truthfully
• Uneasy tension between taste and appetite, substance and insubstantiality
• 'feast your (eyeballs) on the sea' eyeballs tragic reminder of flesh's vulnerability (King Lear) -metonym for body's cravings, disrupting eye's idealization of the scene - speakwer's appetite can't be allegorized into taste

La Belle Dame sans Merci 

• 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is when Keates realises that hunger underpins his work
• autumn is when world is ripe, but the fruitfulness and plenty give way to withered sedge in the ballad - through hungry eyes of knight the world appears 'blighted' - has the knight lost his ability to taste
• he's too hungry to experience taste
• knight ohysically wasting away for no reason (sexual hunger?) lack of proper nutrition
• given food by dame - poisones?
• dame -consuming love, seductive death, danger of swallowed up by literary tradition
• fevered condition - skews senses - unable to experience disinterested pleasure
• 'The Pleasures of the Imagination' by joseph aDdison (for Addison 'humans come into the world with a fresh slate with all knowledge coming from sense perception and experience' 'Imagination as an internal sense that could add pleasure to perception' 'important to cultivate it')
• aesthtic experience long been held as seperate from bodily sensation
• addison asks why desires beyond basic needs that sustain humans
• sensual pleasures of appetite (full or empty belly) and intermediate pleasures of sense
• are senses pleasures of mind Hobbes: 'anything that is pleasure in the sense the same is also pleasure in the imagination'
• pleasures of imagination allow to take more than bodily delight
• Light and colours are only ideas in the mind - Addison
• Is knigh ailing because he can no longer 'tast'e the beauty around him
• Allegory of taste - signed it 'caviare' instead of his name - Keat's had been criticeised for his 'sugar and butter sentiments that cloys and disgusts' (Richard Woodhouse)
• Keats said those who didn't understand poetry had 'a taste vitiated by the sweetmeats and kickshaws' of the age

Ode to melancholy

• In Ode to Melancholy physical taste acheives symbolic significance
• Herder 'the object of sensibility is always sensuous'
• has lots of gustatory and ingestive imagery
• 'glut' 'feed deep'
• Vendler 'world of violently taken pleasure'
• bursting of grape ' centrality and normaliciy of aesthetic response'
• levinson sees grape as dysfunctional consumption - unnaturally restricted consumption
• 
  

More for Keats and The Body:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25434178?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102869763323
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30213047?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102907489093

Modern Walls

I just feel a bit sad.
That's all.
Searching for a Messiah is hard
Especially when he already exists
But it's so much easier to make men into Gods
You can watch videos of them being cute and funny
And waste your life away
Another manifestation of the patriarchy perhaps?
But I'm babbling
Because I can't communicate
Sure there are lots of extra ways to
But I have nothing to say
That someone hasn't said before
That someone could'nt say better
That is of worth
So I sit
On My Bed
Procrastinating
Because life is for wasting
After all consumerism tells us so.

Sexuality and consumption in Keats and Dracula

A link is made in both Keats and Dracula between sexuality and consumption, with love and desire often consuming a person or causing them to be consumed.

Both Keats and Dracula explore the vampiric aspect of sexuality and love (albeit Dracula perhaps more explicitly). The way that the pot of Basil sucks Isabella’s life and sanity away in Keats’ poem ‘Isabella’ can also be seen in the way Lucy is drained by Dracula. Both Isabella and Lucy have sexual desires, with Isabella unable to ‘sleep’ and is ‘sick (with) longing’ while Lucy wants to ‘marry three men’. These desires are perhaps what enables them to be preyed upon so easily, with both effectively going out in the night to find a lover; Lucy while she sleepwalks, Isabella to Lorenzo’s grave. This perhaps paints desire as a weakness, and certainly both women become ‘pale’ and lose the ‘roses’ of their cheeks, showing a loss of vitality and life. Love does not only seem to consume their health, but their beauty and their very womanhood, with the ‘rose’ being not only a sign of beauty, but as a flower it is a feminine symbol. This loss is more evident in Dracula where Lucy becomes like a ‘cat’ or a ‘devil’, juxtaposing with the soft and gentle ‘rose’ she once was, and connoting that sexuality had completely absorbed who she used to be and turned her into a inhuman epitome of evil.

Both are presented as experiencing an unnatural and perverted form of motherhood, indicating their lapse from the traditional roles of women and perhaps indicating the dangers of obsessive sexuality. Isabella’s unhealthy and slightly ridiculous obsession with her pot of basil is portrayed as though it has become a surrogate child for her, and she feeds the head of her dead lover her own bodily fluids (her tears) in the darkness of a round pot, perhaps representing the womb, and how she wishes to rekindle and renew the love she once had. The way that she cradles and strokes the pot is also a maternal image, and it ‘flourishes’ while she ‘withers’, once again connoting the vampiric nature of love, and it consumes not just her body but her mind, taking away all her ‘remembrance(s)’ and senses’ as she ‘forget(s)’ the ‘stars’, the ‘autumn breeze’ and everything else beautiful. Likewise Lucy forgets all that she holds sacred and moral when she turns into a powerful sexual vampire, losing the ‘gentleness’ that once had meant she was held in such high esteem by men, and becoming a ‘devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity’. The ‘pure’ and ‘kind Lucy would never feed from a child, and Stoker makes it clear from the newspaper article that Lucy only feeds from ‘young children’. This utter perversion of morality and particularly motherhood illustrates the dangers of sexuality, with Lucy feeding from children instead of feeding them as her maternal instinct would normally prompt her to, consuming what she would normally feed. Perhaps the fact that her blood has been sucked away by Dracula has sucked away her personality and morals, leaving her just a husk of what she once was: incomplete and able to be filled a new with what is other and wrong.

Similarly Isabella has her living human love replaced with an intoxicatingly strong and luscious basil plant that ‘smells more balmy than its peers’, uses her sensual reaction to it to manipulate her and control her, as she tries to regain the strong sensual pleasures she enjoyed with her living love, of his ‘voice’ and his ‘gentle hand’. In both instances, the feelings of love or sexuality these women had are turned into something dangerous and sinister, and profoundly change both women for the worse. Perhaps both Stoker and Keats are warning of the dangers of sexuality and love, particularly when it is given by the wrong people, but Keas focuses more on love as an obsessive and consuming force whereas Stoker focuses on sexuality’s ability to corrupt and consume what once was.

Words from Keats

Canto - A way of dividing a long poem
Cognomen - a name, usually a surname etc

The Context of 'The Prince'

Machiavelli and the context in which he wrote The Prince

In the sixteenth century, when Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Italy was not a unified country.  Instead, it was a collection of city-states, each with its own court and ruler, each attempting to gain power over the others.  In addition to being a place of domestic intrigue, Italy was also a battleground for the power-hungry French, the Spanish, the Germans, and the forces of the Catholic Church under the Popes (who were, in essence, as powerful as secular kings at this time).  One of the major Italian city-states, the republic of Florence, had long maintained an alliance with the French, and when Pope Julius II defeated the French in 1512,  Florence was defeated too.  Pope Julius declared that he would not agree make peace unless Florence ceased to be a republic and accepted the Medici family as their rulers.

These political developments had a serious impact on the life and career of Machiavelli.  Hardly a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of princes, Machiavelli had actually served for the past thirteen years as a counselor and diplomat for the former rulers of Florence, the anti-Medici republicans (his first book, The Discourses, presents a theory of republican government). 

When Florence fell into the hands of his princely enemies, Machiavelli narrowly escaped execution and found himself exiled instead.  Formerly a man who lived in the center of political power, Machiavelli was now unemployed and disgraced (not to mention bored!) in the countryside outside Florence.  He began to write a series of letters, begging the new Medici rulers in Florence to allow him to return to his beloved city.  He continued this unsuccessful effort for fourteen years, until his death in 1527.

We must read The Prince, written in 1513, as one of the first of the documents that Machiavelli wrote in order  to ingratiate himself with the new Florentine prince, Lorenzo de Medici.  Is Machiavelli insincere?  Is he a hypocrite?  After all, his first book declared that a republic was the ideal form of government, not a state governed by the authority of a prince.  And yet, we must note that Machiavelli never says anywhere in The Prince that he likes the notion of government by princes.  He merely states that if a country is going to be governed by a prince, particularly a new prince, he has some advice as to how that prince should rule if he wishes to be great and powerful.  In other words,

Machiavelli’s book is absolutely practical and not at all idealistic.  Leaving aside what government is “best” in an ideal world, The Prince takes for granted the presence of an authoritarian ruler, and tries to imagine how such a ruler might achieve success.  It is, of course, also entirely topical as well:  Machiavelli offers Lorenzo an expert handbook that deals with precisely the situation of Florence at the time.  He seems genuinely interested in using his political experience, as well as his wide reading in history and philosophy, to help Lorenzo be the best prince he can be.  But he also obviously expected some personal gain from the book as well –  Machiavelli clearly hoped that Lorenzo would find The Prince so helpful that he would immediately bring its author back to Florence where he could be a political counselor once again!

Unfortunately, Machiavelli’s cunning plan didn’t work.  Despite the lavish praise for Medicis and Popes that continues throughout The Prince, Lorenzo did not seem to like the book very much, and certainly never called Machiavelli back from exile.  Ironically, shortly before Machiavelli died, Charles V of France defeated the Pope and removed the Medicis from power.  Florence became a republic once again, and Machiavelli surely expected his long exile to end at last.  There was one slight problem, however:  Machiavelli had written a short book dedicated to Prince Lorenzo de Medici, advising him on how best to acquire and maintain power – not a very republican thing to do!  And so, that very book that Machiavelli had hoped would bring him back to Florence – The Prince – finally kept him away for good.

Summary of the Argument

Machiavelli perhaps wrote The Prince in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Medici princes who had recently taken over the government of his native city, Florence, in the early sixteenth century (see the rather overstated flattery in the prefatory letter to Lorenzo de’Medici).  He intended this book to be a kind of “how-to:” a short, pithy handbook for princes who have gained power and wish to keep it.  Accordingly, it begins by dividing all governments into two kinds:  republics and “principalities” (those ruled by a “prince,” or single ruler).  Machiavelli swiftly dismisses the first kind of government as being outside the scope of his argument.  He then goes on to subdivide the latter kind.  Principalities, he writes, are of two kinds:  there are those which have been ruled by a family for a long time, and those which are newly conquered.  It is this last kind, obviously, that concerns Machiavelli most, and he spends the rest of The Prince sketching ways in which the “new prince” can acquire and maintain the greatest amount of power.

Machiavelli first considers “mixed principalities,” or new territories annexed to older ones.  The new prince of such a state, he writes, should wipe out the family of his predecessors in the, and should take care not to change the old laws –if need be, he should live there himself, and learn the customs of his new subjects, so they won’t consider him a “stranger.”   He should also set up colonies of his own men in the new lands, and should weaken any strong neighbouring enemies so that he will have no rival conquerors.  In all things, Machiavelli writes (as he does many times in the book), the new prince should not only keep an eye on present dangers, but on possible future dangers – a good example of this is the Roman rule of new provinces.

When a new prince takes over a state governed by an absolute ruler, the process of acquiring power is that much more difficult.  However, once such a kingdom is conquered, it is much easier to rule, since its subjects are used to oppression.  Darius, for instance, took over lands from Alexander the Great, and was able to rule them without fear of revolt, since his new subjects were accustomed to having no voice in government.   Republics, by contrast, are very easy for a new prince to conquer, but almost impossible for him to rule.  Once a new prince has gained control over a former republic, Machiavelli implies that he really has no choice but to destroy it entirely and rebuild it.

Machiavelli then proceeds to consider relationship between luck and skill in the gaining and keeping of power.  He introduces two key terms:  fortuna, which means “luck,” “chance,” “accident,” or “fortune,” and virtu, which means, literally, “manliness,” and which can also be defined as “skill,” “cunning,” “power,” “ability,” or “strength.”  Which is more important for a prince to have on his side?  Machiavelli suggests, over and over, that a prince is better off relying on virtu than on fortuna.   However, one of the key advantages of virtu is that it enables a prince better to exploit and master fortuna..  He will say later that fortuna e una donna (“fortune is a woman”) and must be dominated.  Here, though, he stresses the connections between fortuna and virtu as necessary for successful rule.  A prince must be able to seize opportunities through skill in what Machiavelli calls a “lucky shrewdness.” 

What kind of actions should a virtuoso (skillful) prince take?  Well, he avoids using other princes’ troops or hiring mercenaries to do his dirty work – such a reliance on outside help makes a prince the helpless victim of fortune .  He does not come into power through overt crime, nor does he allow himself to gain a reputation for cruelty – but he is able to use crime and cruelty when he needs to, carefully concealing his guilt.   A virtuoso prince will not alienate the people he governs, but he will not let the need to be loved by them take precedence over the necessity of being feared by them.   In order to maintain his power, a  prince must earn the loyalty of his subjects, and he can best do this by protecting them.  And any prince who shows himself to be strong enough to protect his subjects must also show himself to be strong enough to be feared by them – though, of course, never gratuitously cruel to them.   Above all, a virtuoso prince must acknowledge the fact that he does not live in an ideal world.  He should therefore “learn not to be good” when a particular occasion (fortuna again!) renders it more advantageous to be bad. In subsequent chapters, Machiavelli describes how a prince can break promises, commit crimes, and generally behave nastily for political advantage.  But he also insists that a prince should learn to avoid the hatred that would result from exposure of his bad behaviour.  He should instead cultivate a reputation for “goodness,” even if that reputation is false.  In other words, for Machiavelli’s prince, it’s better to look good than to be good.

According to Machiavelli, a prince learns such virtue by particular kinds of study:  first, and most importantly, the study of warfare.  He should spend lots of time strategizing, exercising, and preparing himself for battle.  Such  training makes a man more likely to achieve power through conquest, and less likely to succumb to laziness once he achieves it.   In addition, any prince who wishes to be powerful should also study histories of successful princes, in order to understand what has worked for men in the past and model his behavior on them.  In a sense, The Prince itself is a kind of history book, compiling short examples of good (and bad) rulers throughout history for the edification of its princely readers.  

George Eastman

Found the complexity of photography a serious bar to enjoying it  so developed a dry plate, setting up Kodak.

Importance: Invnted snapshot photography, bringing photography to the masses

The Lumiere Brothers

Method: Gelatin-silver-bromide dry plate. Used mosiac of microscopic potato starch grains with bits of carbon black in between, then covered with shellac layer and coated in panchromatic emulsion

Importance: Invented the autochrome, the first viable colour photography process

Eadweard Mubridge

Importance: Applied photography to what the eye could actually be

The Horse in Motion

William Henry Fox Talbot

His method:

• Invented salted paper print
• coating writing paper with it then put a coat of silver nitrate on top
• Through contact printint he could make a cameraless picture as it made a negative version of objects
• The coated paper darkens on exposure to light so their was no need for development
• He could then make a positive image by contact printing the negative

Importance: Orginated the method upon which all subsequent photography was based (until the invention of electronic imaging)

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre

• Worked with another Frenchman to fix a permanent positive image on a metal plate
• Trained as theatre set painter and designer

Importance:

Invented the first visible photograohic process to be announced to the world

How is sex and sensuality presented in Isabella?

In his poem Isabella Keats presents sex and sensuality as being physical and highly dependent on the senses, whilst also representing it as a consuming and connecting force.

Keats explores the way that physicality is needed to maintain love, and the way that the denial of this affects love. Throughout the poem there are references to Isabella’s then Lorenzo’s physicality, with him enjoying her ‘full shape’ and how he is unable to live without ‘tast(ing her) blossoms’, whilst she becomes much more obsessed with his physicalness once he is dead and she can no longer possess his soul. The way she ‘com’d’ his ‘wild hair’ and ‘Pointed each fringed lash’ gives her an obsessive and yet motherly quality, as combing can be seen as a bonding activity between a parent and their child, and Keat’s emphasis on the word ‘each’ makes her sound meticulous and as though she has become absorbed in menialities. This could perhaps relate to gender stereotypes as men are often seen as more lustful and women as more faithful, and yet both suffer when they are apart. This could suggest both are in constant need of each other’s presence, or that the desire for each other physically makes them ‘sick with longing’, with the word ‘sick’ connoting both a hunger and need for each other, and that their emotions are strong, intensified through absence which drives Lorenzo to ‘watch’ as ‘constant as her vespers’. The word ‘vespers’ could signify his religious devotion, and perhaps contains hints that he needs her as much as humans need Jesus’ body through during communion, painting her as saving him and bringing light into his life. Alternatively however, Keats also portrays love and sex as being physically detrimental to the body, or at least the absence of it ‘makes their cheeks paler’, perhaps connoting the denial of sensual pleasure takes the life from their cheeks, suggesting the idea that physical closeness is the basis of love and sexual desire, both through its absence and its fulfilment, with references to the soul focused mainly when Lorenzo’s soul is absent from his physical body. Perhaps Keats is suggesting that while souls are important for long term affection, the body is the driving force behind physical attraction and desire.

However, the poem is also full of sensuality, with Keats exploring the connection between it and the senses and proximity. There is a music lexis running through the poem, with Isabella’s seeming to give out music with her ‘laugh full musical’, and ‘lute-string giving out an echo of his name’, whilst wishing that Lorenzo’s lips would ‘breathe... love’s tune’. This reliance of sound emphasizes the barriers between them, and their inability to be together physically which heightens the importance of their senses. That Lorenzo knows ‘whose gentle hand was at the latch’ before he’s seen Isabella shows the way that the denial of physical pleasures has deepened the connection between them, and how not being able to see her ‘hand’ at the ‘latch’ makes his expectations and longing much stronger than if they were together all the time. The word ‘hand’ highlights the way that imagination and yearning have taken a more prominent role in their relationship, so much so that Lorenzo has to speak out even when Isabella is ill, to tell her of his intense cravings to touch her. The way he describes their being together through natural metaphors such as a ‘ripe warmth’ as opposed to the manmade ‘in-door lattice’ could perhaps suggest that their love is natural and pure, and is organic instead of restrictive as the ‘lattice’ is. It also connects to Song of Songs, comparing their love to that of Solomon, elevating it to a higher plane, however the use of the words ‘ripe’, ‘lusty’ and ‘blossoms’ make their relationship sound much more sexually orientated, perhaps connoting that delayed gratification makes it all the stronger. Isabella and Lorenzo’s relationship involves all the five senses at first, but this changes after his death as she appears to lose her senses, as she ‘forgets’ everything sensual about the natural world that Lorenzo used to compare her too, letting go of the feeling of a ‘breeze’, hearing the ‘waters run’ and seeing the ‘stars, the moon and sun’. Instead, one sense grows stronger: her sense of smell. That this is the only sense not particularly involved in the early stage of their relationship indicates the way it has changed, with the loss of him giving her no use for her senses. The fact that basil smells so strongly however, with Keats remarking ‘it smelt more balmy than its peers’, is perhaps not only to mask Lorenzo’s decaying head, but also is intoxicating, and its strength could be overpowering her other senses and leaving her fixated upon itself, keeping her from the world around it. The smell’s strength could even remind her of the extreme sensuality she felt with Lorenzo, or it could have such power because the basil has grown out of him and consequently might have the same intoxicating effect. Either way Keats, highlights the links between the senses and emotions, and the way that sensuality can be a wondrous, loving thing or a poisonous, trapping one.

The way that sensuality and sex and be a connecting and a consuming force is also traced through the poem, with Keats exploring the implications of sexual desire and love. At the beginning of the poem, Lorenzo and Isabella’s love is shown to be both connecting as they are ‘twin roses’, and consuming, as the lovers become ‘pale’ and ‘nightly weep’. The fact that they cannot ‘sleep’ is indicative of suffering for love, and the denial of each other’s presence as making them ‘sick’ as they are so connected they need to be together all the time. However, this could also be seen as a consuming force, as their senses and emotion become so concentrated in one another the rest of the world seems unimportant. Furthermore, Keats could be suggesting this all-consuming love is the most devastating of all, because when the ‘twin roses’ become separated by death, Isabella ‘withers’, sacrificing both her mind and eventually her life to her devastating loss. So consumed is she that she kisses Lorenzo’s decaying and mouldy head, losing all sense of reason and hope and becoming utterly absorbed in maintaining his memory. This is another example of how love and desire consume, with Isabella growing ‘thin’ whilst the basil growing out of Lorenzo grows ‘thick’, with it feeding of her in a vampiric way, sucking any life or hope of moving on from her. The way that she wraps herself around her circular ‘garden pot’, feeding it with her won bodily fluids (her tears), is much as a mother feeds her growing child from her own body, with the pot perhaps symbolising the womb. This is a profoundly disturbing image, particularly as ‘basil’ is such a trivial thing that it is not worth giving up your lifeblood for, and her utter absorption in it, not noticing ‘day’ or the ‘new morn’ illustrates how love and desire can become warped and utterly consuming, and perhaps Keats is warning of the dangers of such as profound and complete investment.

In conclusion Keat explores the way the sensuality is driven by physicality and proximity, but also how it can be a dangerous force in the way that it can consume people.