La Belle Dame sans Merci and Keats’s Struggle with Abandonment

Despite its brevity, John Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci holds as an extraordinarily rich and expressive piece that articulates Keats’s own perception of the “femmes fatales”. I think it’s interesting to compare Keats’s portrayal of women to Byron’s; while both seem to purport women as seductresses who control men with their alluring physical appearance, there seems to be much more anger and sexism in Byron’s work. Unlike Byron, Keats’s seems to hold a softer view of women and places less blame on them. As a corollary, Keats’s also does not seem to present men in the same “helpless victim” role, but rather a more bewildered or aloof representation.

It seems that Keats’s portrayal of women is probably somewhat reflective of his upbringing, particularly the circumstances he faced with his mother. With his father dead at the age of 9, Keats’s mother was left alone to care for him and his siblings; unfortunately, his mother was known to be extremely inconsistent in her care for Keats and his siblings. One day, she abruptly abandoned the family for four years leaving Keats and his siblings with their grandmother for care. This experience was undoubtedly incredibly traumatic to Keats and was probably the single greatest catalyst for his formation of the perception of women as inconstant presences that could disappear at any instant.

With such a flighty mother-role, it seems appropriate to speculate that this perception of women comes through in much of his writing including La Belle Dame sans Merci. In this piece it seems clear that the beautiful “faery’s child” who has assumed the role of the fleeting presence of women. At first the woman seduces the knight with her beauty and then lures him to her “elfin grot”. Promising that she “loves him true”, the knight follows her to her cave where he is then lulled to sleep. Upon waking he finds himself on the cold hillside alone where he remains waiting for her return. The knight’s circumstances may at first seem cliché, but upon considering Keats’s own struggle with abandonment, the message is tragic and reflects the pain that Keats must have experienced in facing the loss of his mother.

La Belle Dame sans Merci is a simple yet beautiful poem that seems to be a deeply personal manifestation of Keats’s struggle with women and abandonment. I’m interested to see if this portrayal of women as powerful yet inconstant figures remains consistent throughout the rest of his work.