© 2017 Caolan Madden ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PERFORMING POETESSES: COLLECTIVITY AND THEATRICALITY IN VICTORIAN POETRY by CAOLAN MADDEN A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Carolyn Williams And approved by _______________________________________ _______________________________________ _______________________________________ _______________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey OCTOBER 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Performing Poetesses: Collectivity and Theatricality in Victorian Poetry By CAOLAN MADDEN Dissertation Director: Carolyn Williams This dissertation traces the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history of what I call “Poetess theatricality”: a highly gendered literary mode that imagines the poem as a space for collective, spectacular theatrical performance. As a corrective to popular and critical depictions of the Poetess’s solitary suffering, and as an expansion of more recent accounts of the Poetess as an “empty” and abstract figure, this dissertation argues that Poetess performance was understood by Victorian audiences to be multiply embodied: a chorus not only of voices but of gesturing, costumed bodies whose performances invoked the material profusions of popular print cultures, the crowded, often messy realities of social life, and the possibilities of social reform. Drawing on recent work in nineteenth-century poetics on the gendered, citational performances we now associate with the figure of the Poetess, as well as on scholarship on the significance of spectacle in the Victorian theater, this project revises existing understandings of the relationship between Victorian poetry and dramatic form: while the most significant poetic innovation of the period, the dramatic monologue, has ensured that Victorian ii poetry has always been associated with the theater, this study argues for a collective, spectacular theatricality that the genre of dramatic monologue does not accommodate. The period covered by this dissertation (1823 – 1922) saw the consolidation of the Poetess as a familiar figure in nineteenth-century print culture. As the popular success of seemingly chaste and moral Poetess writers such as Felicia Hemans made print publication more respectable for women poets, the role of Poetess became increasingly distinct from the more dangerously public, sexually compromised roles of “playwright” or “actress.” This dissertation shows, however, that the figure of the actress was never fully detached from the figure of the Poetess; instead, the collective, corporeal, spectacular aspects of theatrical performance reappear, continually reconfigured, as a major feature of Poetess writing throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in the sprawl of feminine bodies, objects, and texts in Hemans’s Records of Woman; the casually citational, shape-shifting figures that circulate in gift books compiled by Letitia Elizabeth Landon (otherwise known as L.E.L.); the elaborately stage-managed crowds of working-class and aristocratic supernumeraries who threaten the heroine’s narrative control in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh; the poet-housewives and sympathetic audience-actors in Augusta Webster’s essays and dramatic monologues; and the characters, readers, and performers who form temporary communities through their recitation of the portable, quotable catchphrases in the work of Charlotte Mew. In directing critical attention to the theatricality of the Poetess, this dissertation works to connect recent work in Victorian poetics with the gendered, embodied experiences, performances, and stuff that have been the object of so much important feminist criticism. iii Acknowledgements This dissertation argues for the significance of poetry as collective endeavor, and I feel lucky to have been supported and encouraged in this work by a crowd of teachers, colleagues, and friends. I am especially grateful to my dissertation committee, whose thoughtful and generous engagement not only helped me to shape the project, but kept me excited about its unfolding ideas. Carolyn Williams influenced and encouraged this project from the beginning and read multiple drafts of every chapter, continually suggesting how I might put my ideas in conversation with recent work in poetry and poetics; her expert guidance pervades every page of the dissertation, and her practical advice ensured that I had the time and resources to finish it. Carolyn’s enthusiasm for her colleagues’ ideas meant that I had the opportunity to meet several times with the whole committee and to benefit from their collective wisdom at crucial junctures in my writing process. Meredith McGill, who was my first adviser at Rutgers, brought the same infectious intellectual energy to our committee meetings that she brought to our advising meetings early in my graduate school career; her perspective as an Americanist was foundational to my understanding of the Poetess as a transatlantic figure, and the project benefited enormously from her expertise in the history of print culture, her thoughts on the gendered consequences of public performance for women, and her generous, collaborative approach to conversations about poetry and poetics. Jonah Siegel’s attention to the scope and structure of the dissertation, and gift for suggesting directions in which my research should go, led to some of the most significant breakthroughs in my argument; meanwhile, his line edits and writing advice sharpened my prose and will continue to influence many writing projects to come. Finally, Tricia Lootens began iv shaping this project long before the dissertation defense, generously sharing the text of her Political Poetess before it was published, and offering both big-picture feedback on the project and exquisitely detailed and helpful responses to my first chapter. Tricia’s suggestion that I concentrate on theatricality and performance brought the whole project into focus and helped me see where my own enthusiasm for the dissertation lay; I feel incredibly lucky to have benefited from the insight of someone who has thought so deeply and brilliantly about the ongoing history of the Poetess. Thanks, too, to the many other teachers and readers who have engaged with this project: to Lynn Festa and the participants in her Fall 2012 dissertation writing seminar, who not only encouraged me to think rigorously about key questions in the dissertation, but who helped me to believe I could write a dissertation at all; to David Kurnick and Kate Flint for helping me to think critically about gender, genre, and private and public space during our meetings leading up to my qualifying exams—and for writing scholarship that became indispensable to my argument; and to the Montrose Circle, without whose collegial, convivial feedback and advice I may never have written anything. I am indebted, too, to teachers who shaped my thinking about poetry and poetics long before this project began: to Rutgers professors William Galperin, Emily Bartels, Mark Doty, Elin Diamond, Marianne DeKoven, and Chris Iannini; to Ammiel Alcalay and the Lost & Found community at CUNY and Elisabeth Frost at Fordham for their perspectives on twentieth-century and contemporary poetry; to Mary Jo Salter, who encouraged my interest in nineteenth-century poetry and my love of archival research; and to Tom Otten, who introduced me to the pleasures of close reading and whose v brilliance and enthusiasm guided my undergraduate research on Sylvia Plath, research that inspired and continues to undergird this dissertation. This project has benefited materially from a travel grant from the Rutgers Department of English, which allowed me to travel to London to do archival research for my chapters on Augusta Webster and Charlotte Mew at the British Library; and from a fellowship to the Dickens Project in Santa Cruz, California, where many thrilling conversations with colleagues gave me a wider understanding of Victorian literature as a field. In addition to the British Library, I am grateful for access to the Mill Taylor collection at the London School of Economics, and the Berg and Pforzheimer collections at the New York Public Library. A portion of Chapter Four appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of Victorian Poetry, a special issue on Augusta Webster edited by Patricia Rigg; I am extremely grateful to Professor Rigg for her thoughtful suggestions. I would also like to thank the organizers and participants at the conferences where early sections of many of my chapters were presented, including NAVSA, NVSA, INCS, and the Rutgers Graduate Symposium; in particular, I would like to acknowledge the participants at the 2015 NVSA conference in Providence, Rhode Island, whose feedback was especially helpful to my fourth chapter. In addition, I am profoundly grateful to Lauren Kimball for her collaboration on a panel proposal for the C19 conference (and to Meredith McGill for suggesting the collaboration); our conversations, and her work on performance and reform movements, helped me to articulate many of the major questions that shaped my final dissertation. Of my classmates and colleagues, I also wish to thank Mimi Winick, Becca Klaver, Elizabeth Oldfather, Mark DiGiacomo, Fred Solinger, and Kyle McAuley for vi advice on chapter drafts, conference proposals, and countless questions about academic life; my Ph.D.