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Delacroix Diss Final Copyright by Julia Penn Delacroix 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Julia Penn Delacroix certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Writing with an Iron Pen: Gender and Genre in Early American Elegy Committee: Lisa L. Moore, Supervisor Matt Cohen, Co-Supervisor Elizabeth Cullingford Kurt Heinzelman Chad Bennett Writing with an Iron Pen: Gender and Genre in Early American Elegy by Julia Penn Delacroix, B.A.; M.A.; M.F.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Acknowledgements I am incredibly grateful to the many people who have offered their time and their advice on this work. My dissertation directors, Lisa L. Moore and Matt Cohen, provided invaluable guidance at every stage of the project. It would not exist without them. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Elizabeth Cullingford, Kurt Heinzelman, and Chad Bennett, for their encouragement, their careful readings, and their advice. I am grateful to my dissertation reading group as well: M.K. Matalon, Kevin Bourque, Nandini Dhar, and Stephanie Rosen provided helpful feedback on early drafts of these chapters. And other readers, particularly Laura Smith, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Sequoia Manor all offered support and suggestions which made this a better dissertation. I owe thanks as well to a few institutions. The University of Texas at Austin provided financial support, and the archivists at the Library Company of Philadelphia were extremely helpful in my research on Hannah Griffitts. Finally I would like to acknowledge the unrelenting support and encouragement of my friends and family, who are wonderful and who remind me, when I forget, that the grief in these poems is evidence not only of loss but also of love. iv Writing with an Iron Pen: Gender and Genre in Early American Elegy Julia Penn Delacroix, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisors: Lisa L. Moore and Matt Cohen Abstract: In my dissertation, “Writing with an Iron Pen: Gender and Genre in Early American Elegy,” I show how the work of early American women poets engages the same generic questions about the process and use of consolation as modern anti- elegies. The first half of the dissertation focuses on poems written by one of America’s earliest poets. In chapters one and two I look to the elegies of Anne Bradstreet to show how, from the first book of poems published by an American colonist, women poets have highlighted the limits of the consolatory elegy when either elegist or elegized was not a valued male member of the community. In chapters three and four, I turn to the Age of Revolutions and eighteenth-century poets Hannah Griffitts and Phillis Wheatley. Their elegies, I argue, extend and expand grief even as they refuse the sympathetic identifications that, in contemporary poems, offer opportunities for demonstrations of sympathy key to the earliest formations of American national identity. Ultimately, I suggest, early American women’s poetry offers another location from which to contest the problems of affect, power, identity, and community posed by the conventional elegy. v Table of Contents Introduction - Mapping Elegy..................................................................................1 The Difficult Economy of Consolation..................................................3 Early American Elegy............................................................................7 Gender and Genre in Early America....................................................12 Female Elegy .......................................................................................20 Chapter One - Sparing Fame: Anne Bradstreet and the Pastoral Elegy........................................................25 The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America...................................31 Sparing Fame: Bradstreet and the Pastoral Tradition ..........................35 Chapter Two - Say He's Merciful: Anne Bradstreet's Family Elegies.................................................................72 Argument Enough: Bradstreet and the Puritan Funeral Elegy............73 Mouths Put in the Dust: Bradstreet's Late Family Elegies ..................97 Chapter Three - Sighs to their Sighs: Hannah Griffitts's Sympathetic Identifications...........................................114 Your Fidelia: Hannah Griffitts and her Sororal Network .................119 Flattering Tongues: The Funeral Elegy in the Eighteenth Century ...125 Waked to Ecstacy: The Proto-Romantic Elegy ................................134 Beloved Grief: The Sentimental Elegy.............................................144 No Earthly Ties: Griffitts's Radical Sympathy ..................................155 Chapter Four - Making Friends with Death: Melancholic Anger in Phillis Wheatley's Infant Elegies ............................164 No More with Joy: Melancholia and Elegy .......................................166 The Life of the Afric Muse ................................................................170 By No Misery Moved: The Limits of Sympathy...............................175 O Death: Wheatley's Infant Elegies ..................................................183 vi Afterward - The Unexpected Hopefulness of Elegy............................................206 Works Cited .........................................................................................................211 vii Introduction Mapping Elegy To write about elegy, as to write elegy, is to reckon distance. How do we measure the space between those who are gone and those who have been left behind, between mourners and those unburdened by loss, between writing and grieving? I want to start at the end. Anne Bradstreet closes her elegy for her granddaughter Elizabeth by bowing under “His hand alone that guides nature and fate” (19). The last lines of Phillis Wheatley’s elegy for the infant C.E. offer an image of heavenly “pleasures without measure, without end” (46). And after fifty years of writing annual poems to commemorate her mother’s death, Hannah Griffitts concludes her elegiac cycle by suggesting that the heavenly reunion awaiting her is “enough; if favor’d, thus, at last, /A healing Balm, for all the past” (“1803” 25-26). For readers of contemporary American elegy, these images of resignation and heavenly consolation invoke yet another distance; it’s hard to find in the closing lines of these elegies any of the spirit of their twentieth and twenty-first century counterparts. How do we measure the space between Bradstreet’s submission to a heavenly father and Plath’s defiant curse: “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through”? 1 The resistance and anger we find in Plath’s poem is characteristic of the genre in the modern age. Although the elegy has always included poems that attack the dead or refuse consolation, the anti-elegy, once the transgression that made the norm visible, has become the dominant mode of a genre incapable of answering the unspeakable losses of the twentieth century. Modern anti-elegists resist and rewrite generic conventions, refusing consolation and attacking themselves, the dead, and the elegy itself. Finding comfort in neither religion nor art nor an idealized image of the lost beloved, these poets foreground in their elegies what Jahan Ramazani calls “the economic problem of mourning,” that is, “the exchange of the work for the life…the gain of poetic benefit from human loss” (343). It is here that we may begin to close the distance between Plath and Bradstreet, Griffitts, and Wheatley. Because they often write in the “low” form of the funeral elegy, because they turn to religion to answer their losses, because they attack neither their dead nor themselves, their poems are most often read as acceptances or recapitulations of received generic codes. But the consolation that these women offer in their poems – when they offer it – is one that they only achieve by remaking the genre to speak to their grief. Like modern anti-elegists, they revise conventions that fail to comfort them. They question both the efficacy of and the motivation behind elegiac consolation. And while they do not angrily renounce their dead, neither do they unquestioningly cling to them. Most importantly, they refuse to accept a consolation that would trade on their losses. Writing of the contemporary anti-elegy, R. Clifton Spargo argues that it functions as “a species of ethical complaint, turning against the history of consolation the poet-mourner 2 inherits as normative in her society” (417). Refusing to offer their personal losses as vehicles for communal consolation, Bradstreet, Griffitts, and Wheatley, like modern anti- elegists, respond to the crisis that arises when a genre cannot answer the needs of its practitioners. In their complex negotiations with, and remaking of, the conventions and mechanics of consolation they write poems that are as much about the elegy itself, its uses and its limits, as they are about the ones they mourn. I. The Difficult Economy of Consolation Speaking to both the living and the dead, the elegy is a Janus of a poem. One face is turned to the past, eyes fixed on the lost, while the other looks the future and the forward-spinning world the dead have left behind. The grief-work undertaken in the elegy is therefore twofold. Seeking to reckon the distance between the elegist and the lost subject, these poems
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