Chapter 12, Rock and Romanticism, Palgrave Macmillan

Chapter 12 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “‘The Female Is Such Exquisite Hell’: The Romantic Agony of My Dying Bride” (pp. 215-233) by Matthew J. Heilman, Ph.D., Duquesne University.

• Chapter summary
  • Matthew Heilman’s “‘The Female Is Such Exquisite Hell’: The Romantic Agony of My Dying Bride” engages Poe’s emphasis on the “death of the beautiful woman” to evaluate My Dying Bride’s work as instances of feminist Romanticism. Through artist interviews and song analysis, Heilman explores central tropes of dark Romanticism—the dead or dying woman and the femme fatale—in both My Dying Bride’s lyrics and in the poetry of Poe, Keats, Baudelaire, and Swinburne to argue that My Dying Bride’s lyrics exploit nineteenth-century dark Romantic tropes of the woman to deconstruct them.
• Music
  • Paradise Lost, “As I Die”
  • Anathema, “They (Will Always) Die”
  • Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Cities in Dust”
  • Bauhaus, “The Three Shadows, Part 2”
  • The Sisters of Mercy, “This Corrosion”
  • Black Sabbath, “Iron Man”
  • Saint Vitus, “Return of the Zombie”
  • Candlemass, “The Well of Souls”
  • Celtic Frost, “Inner Sanctum”
  • Evoken, “In Pestilence, Burning”
  • Skepticism, “The Raven and The Backward Funeral”
  • My Dying Bride
    • “For You”
    • “Sear Me MCMXCIII”
    • “Black Voyage”
    • “Like Gods of the Sun”
    • “L’Amour Detruit”
    • “The Thrash of Naked Limbs”
    • “The Sexuality of Bereavement”
    • “God Is Alone”
    • “The Songless Bird”
    • “The Cry of Mankind”
    • “The Return of the Beautiful”
    • “For My Fallen Angel”
    • “The Light at the End of the World”
    • “Your River”
    • “The Night He Died”
    • “Sear Me”
    • “The Blue Lotus”
    • “The Prize of Beauty”
    • “A Sea to Suffer In”
    • “The Dreadful Hours”
• Literature
  • William Shakespeare
    • Romeo and Juliet 
    • Venus and Adonis
  • Edgar Allan Poe
    • “The Philosophy of Composition”
    • “The Raven”
    • “Annabel Lee”
    • “The Oval Portrait”
  • Charles Baudelaire, “Metamorphosis of a Vampire”
  • John Clare, “An Invite to Eternity”
  • Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
  • Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
  • D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
  • John Keats
    • “Think Not of It, Sweet One”
    • “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Laus Veneris”
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Stanzas Written in Dejection”
  • William Wordsworth, The Prelude
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“
  • Christina Rossetti, “In an Artist’s Studio”
  • Bram Stoker, Dracula
  • Théophile Gautier, “La Morte Amoureuse”
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