MovieChat Forums > Bright Star (2009) Discussion > Right feeling towards women?

Right feeling towards women?


I am confused by that part where he say he doesn't have the right feeling towards women.

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Keats was famously misogynistic, or if not exactly that, you could at least say that he was dismissive of women. It's all over his letters, even of and to Fanny in the very beginning.

'Is it not extraordinary? When among Men I have no evil thoughts, no malice, no spleen - I can listen and from every one I can learn - my hands are in my pockets I am free from all suspicion and comfortable. When I am among Women I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen - I cannot speak or be silent - I am full of Suspicions and therefore listen to no thing - I am in a hurry to be gone - You must be charitable and put all this perversity to my being disappointed since Boyhood - ....I must absolutely get over this, - but how? The only way is to find the root of the evil, and so cure it.' John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Bailey, July 1818

'Nothing strikes me so forcibly with a sense of the rediculous as love - A Man in love I do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world - Even when I know a poor fool to be really in pain about it, I could burst out laughing in his face - His pathetic visage becomes irrisistable.' John Keats, in a letter to his brother George, September 1819


That's why falling in love with Fanny and eventually becoming so reliant upon her and her affection was such a life altering event for him.

"I'd never ask you to trust me. It's the cry of a guilty soul."

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Thank you agulitysoul. I had no idea Keats had that attitude towards women before Fanny.

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Oh wow. I didn't realize that either. It was Mr. Brown who I thought seemed like he was against love. But I didn't think that of Keats.

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