Like an Ahab grizzly in his winter tree trunk, he sucks his sullen paws: "I came here because I don't want a story any longer." Only the loathsome Sylphid has some bite, using her harp to slice and dice.
Long before we've ever met Eve, we are told that her fake gentility had "hardened into a form like layers of wax" around a self-hating wick; that she was "steeped like a teabag in aristocratic pretensions." Long before we've ever met Sylphid, we already know that she's a "resentful, sullen, baleful" "time bomb" of a daughter, as well as fat.
Offering a kind of fantasy escape from personality, Robinson's Sylphid persona is a highly ambiguous and enormously risky invention, one that precariously tests the aesthetic boundaries between Augustan and Romantic standards of taste, the generic boundaries between satiric caricature and personal essay, as well as the gender boundaries between idealizing mythologies of the male poetical character (aligned with Mercury, Proteus, or in Keats's case the chameleon) and depreciating mythologies of the ever-changing, unsubstantial character of women in general.
As they appear within the context of the Memoirs, Robinson's Sylphid editorials suppress the self-fashioning and self-commodifying projects of the venue in which they originally appeared.
I of "The Sylphid," one of the most elegant productions with which we have been honored." On Saturday, 26 October, the Post carried a second endorsement of the "elegant production" and indicated that publication was "intended for Monday next." On Monday, 28 October, however, the Post explained, "the extent of the Gazette and Foreign News, deprives our readers this day of the Sylphid, No I.
Acting as an invisible arbiter of taste and definitive source of consumer information, "The Editor" is obviously fond of delivering pronouncements on the "elegance" of The Sylphid, the "fund of entertainment" it will provide, the day it will appear, and the deadline for purchasing papers.
When Robinson "prepared and arranged" The Sylphid to stand on its own, apart from the editorial apparatus of the Post, she not only created a more continuous and self-sufficient fiction but also made it more difficult for readers to recognize how her Sylphid persona functioned as an imaginative extension of the editorial persona(e) in the Post.
Introducing herself as an "invisible Spy" and commentator on contemporary society, Sylphid explains that she has the power to change form and the "gift of invisibility" as well as "the prescient knowledge ...
(16) In creating her Sylphid persona to challenge this vision, Robinson may well have found inspiration in the feminist voices of her predecessors and contemporaries.
Writing under the name of Sylphid, Robinson not only associates herself with Pope's diminutive beings; she also dissociates herself from the physical body that had been stigmatized as a site of sexual promiscuity ever since her widely publicized affair with the Prince of Wales in 1780.
(18) Presenting the rhetorical equivalent of a well-stamped passport, Sylphid outlines her previous travels from her birthplace in Sicily to the courts of Versailles, "the hot sands of the eastern world," and "the black desarts of the frozen pole." Having observed life in all degrees and stations, Sylphid explains that her present "task [is] to explore the haunts of artificial beings; to watch, unseen, at the toilets of coquets, in the chambers of prudes; at the altars of pious hypocrites; in the vortex of dissipation; on the couch of indolence; in the gloomy closet of avarice, and the superb temple of the unblushing peculator" (16).
