Boundaries broken: Fairies and the possibility of spiritual unity in Keats's poems, and, L. E. L.'s beautiful monster: Revising the female supernatural

I. Fairies appear repeatedly in John Keats's poetry. The fairy characters that reflect native British folklore often have flexible identities. They defy boundaries through their inclinations and actions, which disrupts the clarity of oppositional categories that have traditionally divided life and death, the normative and taboo, and male and female. Through his poetic deployment of fairies, Keats breaks boundaries and reintegrates the components as parts of a whole experience rather than as oppositional, disparate parts. The principle of unity Keats creates, which is symbolized by fairies, is spiritual. His ideas about spirituality and aesthetics also connect to the national context because Keats explores the complex religious history of Great Britain. My analysis of fairies and the perspective they represent enters the critical discourse about Keats's ambiguous relationship to spirituality by showing that he did have a spiritual perspective, one that is based on creating unity among the disparate parts of existence.; II. Letitia Elizabeth Landon's poetic rendition of the Melusine legend, "The Fairy of the Fountains," works with a significant literary tradition concerning supernatural female characters with serpentine qualities. Landon's version of the lamia particularly reflects Geraldine, a character from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel." My analysis of "The Fairy of the Fountains" considers "Christabel" to be an important precedent. Through a comparison of these two poems, certain issues emerge. Lamias occupy marginal positions because they confound boundaries between the human and nonhuman, the horrific and sacred, and the masculine and feminine. Such characters symbolize the status of women in patriarchal societies. The female ability to reproduce makes women both threatening to the family order and necessary to the perpetuation of that order. By highlighting Melusine's beautiful qualities and effacing or explaining her dangerous aspects, Landon evokes sympathy for Melusine and the women she represents while encouraging mutuality and trust in family relationships.