A New Matrix for Modernism

A NEW MATRIX FOR MODERNISM MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS VOLUME 18 STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS edited by William E. Cain Wellesley College ~ 1 Routledge ~ ~ Taylor & Francis Group New York London A NEW MATRIX FOR MODERNISM A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham Nelljean McConeghey Rice ~l Routledge i ~ Taylor & Francis Group New York London This edition published 2011 by Routledge: Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 711 Third Avenue 2 Park Square, Milton Park New York, NY 10017 Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Portions from Mew, Charlotte. Collected Poems and Prose. Ed. and intro. Val Warner. Manchester, Carcanet, 1981, reprinted by permission of Carcarnet Press. All material by Anna Wickham is reprinted by permission of George Hepburn and Margaret Hepburn. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. 10 9 8 76 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rice, Nelljean McConeghey, 1947- A new matrix for modernism: a study of the lives and poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham / by Nelljean McConeghey Rice. p. em. - (Studies in major literary authors; v. 18) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-415-94140-7 (hardback) . 1. Mew, Charlotte Mary, 1869-1928.2. Feminism and literature-Great Britain-History-20th century. 3. Women and literature-Great Britain-History-20th century. 4. English poetry-Women authors-History and criticism. 5. English poetry-20th century-History and criticism. 6. Poets, English-20th century-Biography. 7. Feminist poetry-History and criticism. 8. Modernism (Literature)-Great Britain. 9. Women poets, English-Biography. 10. Wickham, Anna, 1884-1947. 11. Feminism in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR6025.E8 Z87 2002 821' .912099287-<1c21 2002009236 Contents PREFACE ix CHAPTER ONE THE BOHEMIAN AND THE DANDY: "The permanent child alone can return the fabulous world to us." 3 CHAPTER TWO CHARLOTTE MARy MEW 1869-1894: "The moon's dropped child" 21 CHAPTER THREE CHARLOTTE MARy MEW 1904-1913: "Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair!" 41 CHAPTER FOUR CHARLOTTE MARY MEW 1913-1928: "But 1 mean to go through the door without fear" 59 CHAPTER FIVE ANNA WICKHAM 1883-1904: "Where in this wilderness shall 1 find my path?" 79 CHAPTER SIX ANNA WICKHAM 1904-1947: "I married a man of the Croydon class" 91 CHAPTER SEVEN ANNA WICKHAM 1911-1947: "I am a raw uneasy parvenue" 111 vii viii Contents CHAPTER EIGHT THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE: "Poetry is a commitment of the soul" 135 NOTES 141 BIBLIOGRAPHY 147 INDEX 157 Preface Much of the feminist writing of the last several decades in both the U.S. and England has been determined by the critic's desire to reconfigure the mod ernist movement. This book is my contribution to the project. While most of the writers on gendered modernism have begun with a thesis and then set out to prove it, I began with two poets, Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) and Anna Wickham (1883-1947), whose work I have admired ever since I found their poems many years ago in Louis Untermeyer's anthologies. These women pair eclectic poetic styles with feminist content. Yet as I pur sued my interests in literature and poetry, it was easy to forget about them because they didn't feature in any university courses, they were no longer being anthologized, and I learned to apply a formalist, male-modernist poetic aesthetic which revised my initial opinion of their poems. During the early years of the feminist reclamation project, by chance I bought Louise Bernikow's The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, 1552-1950 (1974). Here, Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham are represented by five poems each. Re-reading poems such as "Fame" and "Rooms" by Mew and "Nervous Prostration" by Wickham reminded me of what I had been missing. As much as I admired the technical skill and vision in poems by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden, and the women modernists such as H.D. and Marianne Moore, the poems by Mew and Wickham affect me more profoundly, and intimately. The lack of interest in their work mystified me. Why were they not routinely presented as important modern poets in scholarly writing about modernism? A New Matrix for Modernism is my answer to that simple question. Since I begin with the poets themselves, I have to consider their lives and times as the context for the poems. My critical and theoretical approach is best described as cultural biography. Literary history, feminist theory, other contemporary trends in literary criticism, and cultural studies help me to IX x Preface frame my answer. Drawing on feminist, gender, new historicist, and post colonial theories, the introduction discusses the concept of a gendered modernism, tracing the styles and writers that influenced its development. Following a matrilineal line from Charlotte Bronte through Alice Meynell and May Sinclair, the book explains the emergence of a distinctive women's voice in the Victorian era, and locates its presence through the Edwardian, Georgian, and modern eras. There has been some discussion about whether Charlotte Mew should be classed as a Victorian or modern poet, and whether both Mew and Wickham should be considered Georgian, even though neither appeared in Edward Marsh's anthologies that promoted the Georgian poets. I classify both Mew and Wickham as coeval modern poets, because, despite the fourteen-year difference in their ages, they were both writing and publishing poetry at the same time and with the same group Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop. Wickham's first book of poems, The Contemplative Quarry (1915) and Mew's The Farmer's Bride (1916) situ ate their production at the same time as Pound's Lustra (1916) and Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In my quest to establish a permanent place for Mew and Wickham's genius, I treat as meaningful whatever information I find. Tangents abound because I cannot separate the personal from the poetic. Claude Levi Strauss's definition and treatment of the term bricolage in The Savage Mind (1962) and Totemism (1962) enables me to search through all the bits and pieces left over from previous renderings of the era, or even to rehabilitate ideas or concepts dismissed as irrelevant by some critics. His understand ing of the my tho-poetic nature of bricolage, and the excitement inherent in a total re-working of the relationship between the real and the imaginary, has been a key factor in my understanding of the conjunctions betWeen these two women and their culture. I have tried to interrogate all the ele ments of their lives and work that I could, to discover what each of the elements might possibly signify. I use this debris to craft a new matrix for modernism, sometimes deliberately destabilizing the term in the process. I think this is the only possible way to approach Mew and Wickham's con tributions to their era because it is exactly what they themselves were accomplishing with their writing. While both theoretical and poetic para digms can narrowly focus the critical eye, they also can limit the reader's view of the broader milieu, which initially engenders the need to write the poem. A narrow focus slights the life of the poem, as it tends to ignore the importance of readers, who are, after all, what keeps the poem alive. In this book, the poems, which reached and touched some important twentieth century writers, always come first, but they are presented as parts of the historical-biographical-cultural conjunctions (in other words, the matrix) from which Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham emerge. The late nineteen-nineties and early part of the twenty-first century have seen a resurgence of interest in the lives and events of the previous fin de Preface xi siecle and the early years of the twentieth century. Especially among femi nists, historical reflection often concludes that "the more things change, the more they stay the same." In the world of poetry, women poets are still not as widely anthologized as their male counterparts, nor are their poems dis cussed with the same critical complexity because the task of developing a tradition of an un-gendered or feminine poetic aesthetic has not been accomplished. Women poets, Mew and Wickham included, have always fashioned masking strategies to negotiate the language, critical paradigms, and reception practices of the male literary establishment. Therefore it is instructive to revisit the first wave feminist project of recovery, late-Victorian and Edwardian culture and their influences on the modernist movement, and both the fiction and poetry of the era to discuss, once again, the critical and aesthetic formulations that have separated the poetess from the poet. A New Matrix for Modernism began as a larger project, which included fiction writers Dorothy Richardson and Mary Webb. In the course of discovering a body of feminist analysis focused around Richardson's "feminine sentence," I realized that my proposed study was too large for one book, and, since I initially trained in poetry and poetic theory, I decided to concentrate on the poets.

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