Reconsidering Jessie Pope: the Writer Before “A Certain Poetess”
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Reconsidering Jessie Pope: The Writer Before “A Certain Poetess” by Madelyn Michelle Cook A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama December 12, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Madelyn Michelle Cook Approved by Paula Backscheider, Chair, Professor of English Jonathan Bolton, Professor of English Jeremy Downes, Professor of English Megan Haselschwerdt, Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies Abstract In four chapters, I present a case study of Jessie Pope’s early career, focusing on her use of women in her writing for adults. Her women are smart, and their situations are orchestrated by Pope in ways that lay bare negotiations of space, silence, voice, and autonomy for the Edwardian woman. I move from examining broadly her women as they were published in Punch and collected in her first two anthologies, Paper Pellets and Airy Nothings, to a look at how she engages in the conversation surrounding women’s suffrage and the Women’s Social and Political Union and finally an examination of how Pope critiques the language surrounding the rise of the automobile. All draw attention to the situation of women. ii Acknowledgments My journey toward discovering and recovering Jessie Pope has been a long and often frustrating one. I’d like to thank Mary McCormack for introducing me to Wilfred Owen when I was an undergraduate. “Strange Meeting” put me on the path to finding Pope, but I would not have known what to do with her without the guidance of Paula Backscheider. Her seminars in feminism and cultural studies made me the researcher I am today, and I am grateful. Without her patience and knack for knowing just the sort of encouragement I needed, this project would never have been finished. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Jeremy Downes and Jonathan Bolton, for their feedback and willingness to meet Jessie Pope. I owe as much to Amelia Lewis as I do my committee. Long nights in the library, emergency trips to the office, and her very firm advice helped me focus and refine my ideas; Amelia knows Pope as well as I do now. Weekly snark and insights from my Auburn writing group—Heather Finch, Kirsten Iden, and Amelia Lewis—gave me confidence in my work and my perspective. My friends in the East Alabama Community Ballet kept me busy, dancing, and sane. Finally, without the love and support of my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, and my Aldy, I never would have made it this far. Thank you for believing in me. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. iii List of Figures ......................................................................................................................v Introduction ........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: From Punch’s Women to Pope’s Women .......................................................32 Chapter 2: Crossing Lines of Communication: Jessie Pope’s Airy Nothings ................119 Chapter 3: “They Can, and They Will”: Pope’s Suffragist Women ..............................192 Chapter 4: “I Motor”: Pope’s Women Take the Wheel .................................................281 Coda ...............................................................................................................................335 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................340 Appendix 1 .....................................................................................................................355 Appendix 2 .....................................................................................................................356 Appendix 3 .....................................................................................................................357 Appendix 4 .....................................................................................................................358 Appendix 5 .....................................................................................................................359 Appendix 6 .....................................................................................................................360 Appendix 7 .....................................................................................................................361 iv List of Figures Figure 1. Prehistoric Shakespeare. No. 3. “Macbeth.” .....................................................55 Figure 2. Boadicea Monument. .......................................................................................209 Figure 3. “A Boadicea of Politics.” ................................................................................223 Figure 4. “Dorothy Levitt: Her Favorite Photograph.” ...................................................238 Figure 5. Two Photographs from Ladies’ Golf, by May Hezlet. ....................................239 Figure 6. “Division of Labour.” ......................................................................................263 Figure 7. “Any Woman” and “Any Suffragette” as they appear in Airy Nothings. ........271 v Introduction When I began this project in 2013, I had planned to treat all of Jessie Pope’s writing using feminist recovery and cultural studies methodologies. However, as I began primary research, I slowly discovered that Jessie Pope was a far more prolific writer than I had ever imagined. Not only did she write the war poetry for which she is vilified, she wrote light verse, children’s books, short stories, nonfiction, songs, anecdotes, and letters. To date, I have found 593 individual poems, stories, articles, and anecdotes; 326 of these were not collected in any way, and 283 of them (possibly more) were published before the war. This number does not include her children’s books, poetry collections, or short story collections. Pope was more prolific than I could have imagined and more famous before 1914 than I estimated. She worked as an editor for Grant Richards, becoming his go-to writer when books submitted to his firm required editing. As I uncovered the magnitude of her bibliography, it became clear that it would be unfair to focus solely on the writing she accomplished during the First World War. I realized that to recover best Jessie Pope as a woman and as a writer I would need to study her early career, something no other scholar has done. My project is unique in that it not only reads Jessie Pope’s early career, 1900 through 1913, but that it also reads her texts with an open mind. When the only scholars reading Jessie Pope are First World War scholars, it is assumed that her poetry is shallow, petty, and jingoistic. I will demonstrate that this assumption is rarely, if ever, questioned. What I found as I read and reread her poems and stories was a clear focus on the situation of women in the Edwardian historical moment. Within the light humorous voice for which she was famous, there is buried a sharp critique of patriarchy and misogyny. 1 Pope’s women, as I call them, are never as silly or frivolous as they may seem from their positions in Pope’s heavily metered couplets; rather, Pope carefully orchestrates, as I argue, the critique with the punchline. The result is a subtle, yet strong feminist message concealed in plain sight in the pages of an often sexist publication like Punch. When they recover her in the context of Wilfred Owen studies, mid-century scholars mention disparagingly that she wrote on “women’s topics”; one even calls her the “poetess of curling pins.” I found that on one level, Pope does write the way later critics claim: her verses are light and airy and fun. They seem frivolous. But beneath that rhyming surface, we can see Pope grappling with real women’s concerns; we can see her deliberately playing with silence, space, and evasion as modes of resistance and escape. I have found that Pope was so much smarter than even I was giving her credit for. I was amazed, and I continue to be impressed as I keep peeling back the layers of her writing. A focused reception history reveals how firmly lodged in 1914-1918 Pope remains and tracks how critical perceptions of her solidify dangerously from 1931 forward. Further, the need for scholarship on Pope herself becomes clear as we discover how Pope is repeatedly brought to the table only to be abused, then silenced. While it is true that we know Pope today due to the connection to Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the link becomes problematic when it is taken to be the sum of Pope as a woman and as a writer. The link remains problematic when it is used as permission to abuse and silence her, when the link defines Pope in a way that complements the construction of Owen by destroying Pope. Over the course of nearly a century, one woman’s career is sacrificed on the altar of war poetry. As Owen comes to be constructed as a doomed, tragic hero, Pope is set up 2 as a tangible representation of the object of Owen’s righteous anger. She is consistently boiled down to what scholars unquestioningly accept as her true essence, ignoring everything she was before the war and everything she became after the war. With