“KNOW ME WHAT I PAINT”: WOMEN POETS AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE SKETCH 1770-1830

JANE STABLER

Lord flaunted his attack on in “The Vision of Judgment” as “my finest ferocious Caravaggio style”.1 Women writers, however, usually selected more discreet painterly models. Think of Jane Austen’s definition of her own “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory” on which [she] work[ed] with so fine a brush, which was echoed in ’s review of her Flemish minuteness and Charlotte Brontë’s assessment of Austen’s “Chinese fidelity”. But painting allowed women poets to be bold and decorous so it may be a mistake to see the metaphor of the sketch only as expressive of feminine modesty. When the sketch is invoked as a disclaimer – in, for example, Anna Barbauld’s bowing out of a poem with the admission that she lacks “A master’s pencil” and that her Muse’s colours are “too weak” and her lines “too faint” – there almost always seems to be a degree of self-conscious irony, a sense that this gesture is expected and is completed for form’s sake.2 In this essay I shall be looking mainly at first generation women romantic poets and tracing the different ways in which they found the aesthetics of painting and sketching to be liberating rather than constricting launching their flights on the “viewless wings of poesy” and anticipating many of the claims of some of the second generation male romantics. Richard Sha and Jacqueline Labbe have recently examined the way in which women writers invoke visual arts. Both of

1 George Gordon , Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, London, 1973-1994, V, 240. 2 “The Invitation” (11. 184-88), in Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, eds William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, Athens and London, 1994, 9.

24 Jane Stabler them focus on the connections between sketching, drawing, painting and the decorous arts of the “proper lady” – what Barbauld calls “the pencil’s task, the needle or the quill” (“[Martha Jennings]”, l. 8). Sha sees sketching as “an ideological ploy to keep leisure-class women attached to the home”, an occupation denned by “privacy, utility, morality, application, and industry”. This domestic activity, he argues, is subverted unexpectedly by the prose travel writers Helen Maria Williams and Lady Morgan.3 Jacqueline Labbe also defines painting as a discourse of closure.4 On the other hand, scholars like Wenderlin Guenter have continued to work on the “sketch” as a Romantic mode akin to the fragment. Guenter sees the “non finito” as a marker of spontaneity, roughness, energy, liberty. This mode of indeterminacy was appreciated by Burke because it invited the imagination to supply what is not there.5 For Romantic writers, I would like to suggest, painting and sketching always had the potential either to be free or bounded, and that it is women writers who realize this doubleness most effectively.6 While some male Romantic writers specialized in creating hybrid or compound genres – lyrical ballads, dramatic poems, visions in dreams – women writers explored the possibility of doubleness within a particular form or “bounded sphere”.7 This tendency represents a desire to do two things at once, a tendency which we might recognize in many modem feminist attempts to reconcile competitive or mutually exclusive demands. The attraction to contraries might explain the frequent celebrations of technology which we find in first generation Romantic women poets like Barbauld and Seward, or Barbauld’s love of riddles and paradox. Technology brings together

3 Richard C. Sha, “Expanding the Limits of Feminine Writing: The Prose Sketches of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Helen Maria Williams”, in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Counter Voices, eds Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley, Hanover, 1995, 195. 4 Jacqueline M. Labbe, “Every Poet Her Own Drawing Master: Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward and ut pictura poesis”, in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman, London, 1988, 200-14. 5 Wenderlin A. Guenter, “The Sketch, the Non Finito, and the Imagination”, Art Journal, LII/2 (1993), 40-47. 6 For theoretical exploration of feminism’s “in between” status, see Alice Jardine “Opaque Texts and Transparent Contexts: The Political Difference of Julia Kristeva”, in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller, New York, 1986, 96-116. 7 “To Dr Aikin on his Complaining that she neglected him” (The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, 60).