WOMEN's POETRY, LATE ROMANTIC to LATE VICTORIAN Also by Isabel Armstrong

WOMEN'S POETRY, LATE ROMANTIC TO LATE VICTORIAN Also by Isabel Armstrong ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH ROBERT BROWNING: Writers and their Background (editor) THE MAJOR VICTORIAN POETS: Reconsiderations (editor) MANSFIELD PARK: Penguin Critical Studies NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN POETS: An Oxford Anthology (co-edited by Joseph Bristow, with Cath Sharrock) SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: Penguin Critical Studies VICTORIAN SCRUTINIES: Reviews of Poetry, 1830-1870 VICTORIAN POETRY: Poetry, Poetics and Politics Also by Virginia Blain THE FEMINIST COMPANION TO LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Women's Writing from the Middle Ages to the Present CAROLINE BOWLES SOUTHEY: The Making of a Woman Writer Also edited by Isabel Armstrong and Virginia Blain WOMEN'S POETRY IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820 Wotnen's Poetry, Late Rotnantic to Late Victorian Gender and Genre, 1830-1900 Edited by Isobel Armstrong Professor of English Birkbeck College University of London and Virginia Blain Associate Professor of English Macquarie University, Sydney Palgrave macmillan in association with Palgrave Macmillan Selection and editorial matter © Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain 1999 Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 Soficover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 All rights reserved. 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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-3709 Transferred to digital printing 2002 Contents Preface viii Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain Notes on the Contributors xv Part I Changing Genres and Codes across the Century: Ways.of Theorizing Women's Poetry 1 Msrepresentation: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry 3 Isobel Armstrong 2 The Whip Signature: Violence, Feminism and Women Poets 33 Cheryl Walker 3 Personifying the Poetess: Caroline Norton, 'The Picture of Sappho' 50 Yopie Prins Part II The Market and the Poetess: Commercial and Aesthetic Value 4 The Poet and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace 71 Paula R. Feldman 5 Bijoux Beyond Possession: The Prima Donnas of L.E.L.'s Album Poems 102 Cynthia Lawford v vi Contents 6 Rewriting A History of the Lyre: Letitia Landon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the (Re)Construction of the Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet 115 Linda H. Peterson Part III Lesbian Poetics 7 Sexual Politics of the (Victorian) Closet; or, No Sex Please - We're Poets 135 Virginia Blain 8 'I leave a page half-writ': Narrative Discoherence in Michael Field's Underneath the Bough 164 Robert P. Fletcher 9 Amy Levy: Contradictions? - Feminism and Semitic Discourse 183 Emma Francis Part IV Colonial Poetics, National Identity 10 Hearing her Own Voice: Defective Acoustics in Colonial India 207 Meenakshi Mukherjee 11 Reviving Laurence Hope 230 Edward Marx 12 Hemans and her American Heirs: Nineteenth Century Women's Poetry and National Identity 243 Tricia Lootens Contents vii Part V Remaking Discourses - Grotesque, Devotional, Patriotic, Scientific 13 'Measure to yourself a prophet's place': Biblical Heroines, Jewish Difference and Women's Poetry 263 Cynthia Scheinberg 14 'All mouth and trousers': Christina Rossetti's Grotesque and Abjected Bodies 292 Kathryn Burlinson 15 Mysteries Beyond Angels in Christina Rossetti's From House to Home 313 Linda E. Marshall 16 Victorian Women Poets and Scientific Narratives 325 Helen Groth Part VI Re-reading Forgotten Poets 17 Adelaide Procter: A Poetics of Reserve and Passion 355 Gill Gregory 18 Why is this Woman Still Missing? Emily Pfeiffer, Victorian Poet 373 Kathleen Hickok Endnote 390 Cora Kaplan Index 393 Preface Victorian women poets were among the first to be rediscovered in the wave of feminist scholarship and theory which began over two decades ago, and which, in the effort to understand the sexual poli tics of its immediate forebears, concentrated its energies on the nineteenth century in particular. As a result, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Emily Bronte are already an established triad of middle-class poets. In America, Emily Dickinson never really disappeared from view as other poets did. Discussing the changes in feminist criticism of women's poetry in the last twenty years, Cheryl Walker begins with the founding classic and 'groundbreaking study' of women's writing in the nine teenth century, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which was a product of that first wave of criticism and which set the terms of criticism for many years. The power fully innovative work of Elaine Showalter, together with that of Ellen Moeurs, was opening up the field of women's writing at the same time. Some critical frameworks, therefore, have been estab lished for thinking about the achievement of women's poetry. We are not opening up a new terrain but traversing what has to some extent been marked out already. But when the existence in the nine teenth century of many other women poets than the big three or four is recognized, and when, in addition to Victorian poets, the late Romantic poets Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Felicia Hemans are seen to be their precursors, it seems that we have to begin to ask some new questions. Both the critical modes by which we under stand women's poetry and the women's own projects become more uncertain. There are a number of reasons for this uncertainty. Whereas the revolutionary politics of the 1790s provides an ideological axis on which women's poetry turns, there is no such equivalent clarity of political purpose in the nineteenth century. Women's poetry also shared in what we might term the genre meltdown of the post Romantic period. The conventions of the Romantic Ode and narra tive tale are almost as clear as those of the occasional poem, the Georgic and the mock epic of the eighteenth century. In the nine teenth century, lyric, dramatic monologue and narrative do not viii Preface ix possess clear conventions, nor are the boundaries between them delimited. These forms neither belong to Romantic modes nor meet the premises of modernism. Thus the terms on which to approach them are not self-evident. This has given rise to another and related problem which creates difficulties of analysis: though feminism developed a gender criticism in and through nineteenth-century women's texts, it was in other literary periods that the theories and methods of New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Deconstruction and Psychoanalytic Criticism developed their most effective critical practices; it was never clear that a transposition of these theories and methods into late Romantic and Victorian women's poetry would always be fruitful. But if Victorian women's poetry had resisted high theory, theory had developed a resistance to it. When we planned the conference 'Rethinking Women's Poetry 1730-1930', held at Birkbeck College, London, in 1995, from which most of these essays are taken, it was noticeable that the contribu tions offered on the late Romantic to late Victorian period differed from those of earlier periods, perhaps reflecting some of the uncer tainties we have described. There were many more papers on single authors rather than theoretical approaches - suggesting, maybe, that each poet demands a discrete form of analysis - and many more exploring how poets evolved unique, sometimes idiosyncratic discourses, athwart or oblique to cultural norms and expectations. We found that contributors experimented with eclectic critical methods in order to analyse these discourses. This is reflected both in our last section, 'Re-reading Forgotten Poets', and in our penulti mate section, 'Remaking Discourses', where different forms of writing which question norms are examined, ranging from the grotesque to theological and scientific discourse. Exactly what devotional poetry is devoted to turns out to be a major problem. Perhaps this fluidity and ambiguity of purpose among middle class women poets is at present sufficiently preoccupying in itself, so that critics here are not actively looking beyond class boundaries to working-class poets, or beyond national boundaries to American poets, or beyond them to the colonial poets of the nineteenth century British Empire (there were no papers on Australian poets, for instance). The exception to this is a cluster of essays concerned with the mediation of the 'master's' text and the language of power, invoked to rethink national identity in America, and in the colony which obsessed the British in the nineteenth century, India. But, as Meenakshi Mukherjee sharply puts it, those women in India who x Preface 'chose to write in the language of the rulers ..

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