This has been addressed here before, rather at length. But we always welcome newcomers to admire this wonderful film with its inspiring performances and production.
Why leave for Italy?
#1 Many people of his day grasped at straws when it came to treatments for illnesses. Think of the quite horrible practice of bloodletting, for instance, and withholding food, both of which were imposed so heavily on Keats that he almost did not survive them. After his death, Keats' English doctor told Fanny that he knew all along that a trip to a warmer clime had no chance of benefiting Keats, but that he didn't have the heart to squash the hope of Keats' friends.
#2 Keats lived on the charity of his friends. They financed and arranged for this trip. He knew from past personal experience and from his own medical training that there would be no cure. But he embraced the experience. Keats wound up writing some beautiul things about Rome in his journals. That attitude was typical of his perspective on life.
#3 Perhaps Keats believed that distancing himself from Fanny would ease his eventual passing. Perhaps he wanted to spare her the tortuous drawn out deathbed experience that he had with both his mother and his brother.
A really interesting fact is one of the factors that inspired Keats' friends to so forcibly insist upon this trip. They believed and convinced Keats that his constitution was weakened with "love sickness" and that removing him from Fanny would strengthen him. It's that wild grasping at straws once again. And ultimately so sad.
Fanny wrote to his sister, also named Fanny, after Keats' death a long beautiful letter that included the following,
'I am patient, resigned, very resigned. I know my Keats is happy, I know my Keats is happy, happier a thousand times than he could have been here, for Fanny, you do not, you never can know how much he has suffered. So much that I do believe, were it in my power I would not bring him back. All that grieves me now is that I was not with him, and so near it as I was.... He at least was never deceived about his complaint, though the Doctors were ignorant and unfeeling enough to send him to that wretched country to die, for it is now known that his recovery was impossible before he left us, and he might have died here with so many friends to soothe him and me me with him. All we have to console ourselves with is the great joy he felt that all his misfortunes were at an end.'
It is that wretching repeat of the word "me" that we can almost hear her saying with a sob in her voice that catches one as we re-read this letter.
"I'd never ask you to trust me. It's the cry of a guilty soul."
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thoughts-exist
15 years ago
Thank you so much, this response was more than I ever thought I would get. Do you by chance have a link to the full letter she wrote?
And I am sorry for the repeated question, I skimmed the board to make sure it hadn't been answered before but I guess I missed it.
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aGuiltySoul
15 years ago
Well, in all honesty, IMDb deletes threads often. So maybe the original remarks are lost.
Here is a wonderful site that I've found has much information about Keats and Fanny. http://englishhistory.net/keats/fannybrawne.html Brace yourself for it quotes some of the things that were written, and believed, about Fanny's character after her letters from Keats were published after her death,
'Did Fanny Brawne care for the poetry of John Keats? She is dead, and cannot answer, and I have no right to answer for her; but my opinion is that she did not until it had outlived the obloquy which Gifford, and Wilson, and the scorpion Lockhart, had cast upon it. Look at her silhouette, which fronts the letters, and say if the cold, hard, haughty young woman who stood for that could love poetry!
The influence of Miss Fanny Brawne was the most unfortunate one to which Keats was ever subjected. She made him ridiculous in the eyes of his friends, and he hated his friends accordingly.
That poor young woman who nursed Keats in his illness with such devotion and tenderness and then stepped back so stoically as he sailed away from her forever. Judged so poorly by a clearly misogynistic public.
"I'd never ask you to trust me. It's the cry of a guilty soul."
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