Poetic Acts: Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Women’S Poetry, 1840-1880
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POETIC ACTS: PERFORMANCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY, 1840-1880 By Copyright 2014 Jessica L. Jessee Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson, Associate Professor Laura L. Mielke ________________________________ Professor Susan K. Harris ________________________________ Professor Iris Smith Fischer ________________________________ Professor Kenneth L. Irby ________________________________ Professor Sherrie Tucker Date Defended: April 9, 2014 ii The Dissertation Committee for Jessica L. Jessee certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: POETIC ACTS: PERFORMANCE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY, 1840-1880 ________________________________ Chairperson, Associate Professor Laura L. Mielke Date approved: April 9, 2014 iii ABSTRACT My dissertation explores representations of performance (theatrical, oratorical, domestic, and social) in works by canonical poets Emily Dickinson and Sarah Piatt, popular performers Fanny Kemble and Adah Menken, and Spiritualist trance lecturer Achsa Sprague. I consider the work of women poets within the context of a highly performative mid-nineteenth-century American culture – one rich not only in traditional forms such as drama, oratory, sermons and musical performances, but also emerging and developing forms like the revival, public lecture, literary and dramatic recitations, breeches performances, and spiritualist demonstrations. Along with new forms came new media, technologies, and venues for public performance, as well as novel opportunities for women to participate. The prevalence of performance, and the power of its rhetorical techniques and strategies to both inspire and influence audiences, had a profound effect on female writers and their own creative acts. My approach applies current work in several disciplines – cultural studies, theater history, performance theory, feminist theory, American oratory, and literary studies – to a genre and period combination largely ignored by scholars. Focusing on the period 1840 to 1880, I develop careful analyses of many poems while situating them within developments in mid-century performance culture, from changes in the gender and class standing of audiences, ideas about performance’s intended purpose (didactic instruction, sympathetic connection, cathartic entertainment, or impassioned social action), and new technologies and media for its expression, advertising, and distribution. I argue that reading for performance, as subject matter and setting, encourages us to engage more directly with performative aspects of the work itself, particularly as they help to expose tensions within contemporary discourses. A performance reading allows us to historicize and theorize at once, iv with implications not only for studies of mid-century women’s poetry, but also the poetic form and related considerations of lyric subjectivity and sociality. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to the University of Kansas English Department, KU Graduate Studies, and the staff of KU’s Watson Library for their efficiency and professionalism. The daily efforts of Lydia Ash, Lori Whitten, and Robin Holliday in KU English are particularly appreciated. I am indebted to my dissertation committee for their personal attention to my project and their own examples of first-rate scholarship. I thank my director, Laura Mielke, for her patience, humanity, incisive reading and suggestions, and guidance with and beyond this dissertation. I am grateful to Susan Harris for pushing me to consider the cultural contexts that turn close readings into a cohesive argument; to Iris Fischer for passionate support and encouragement throughout the project; to Ken Irby for loving poetry and finding it everywhere; and to Sherrie Tucker, from American Studies and Theater, for her enthusiasm and genuine interest in my defense. As an undergraduate, I was encouraged by wonderful teachers at both Colorado College (Marcia Dobson, John Riker, Joseph Pickle) and Park College (Dennis Okerstrom, Stephen Atkinson, Ronald Miriani). The love and support of family makes every endeavor both bearable and worthwhile. My parents, Randy and Peggy Jessee, first provided a home full of books and a respect for knowledge. My siblings – Hans, Chris, and Jenny – and their spouses/partners supplied much-needed laughter and camaraderie. I am fortunate to have a sister who is also a best friend. My dear nephews, Ian and Taylor, and niece, Elise, inspired me with their own dreams and doings. I thank my in-laws, Chris and Dale Glenn and Jack and Karen Keim, who learned not to ask “how is the writing going?” but supported it nonetheless. Cats Mulligan and Abby were my constant companions during the writing of this dissertation. Most vitally, I thank my husband, Marc Keim, whose unwavering love made every word possible. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One 25 “An Orator of Feather unto an Audience of Fuzz:” Sermons, Graveyard Scenes, and the Popular Audience in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry Chapter Two 61 “White Satin, Gas Lights, Applause, and all”: Female Celebrity and Feminine Subjectivity in the Poetry of Fanny Kemble and Adah Menken Chapter Three 116 “’Tis Angels Speak to You To-day”: Ritual, Reform, and Prophecy in the Poetry of Achsa Sprague Chapter Four 167 “And the Play is – the same sad thing”: Maternal Pedagogy and Performance in the Poetry of Sarah Piatt Coda 220 Notes 230 Bibliography 245 1 INTRODUCTION In addition to many theatrical photographs, taken in character or costume, actress Adah Isaacs Menken also sat for a photo of herself as poet. Taken by Napoleon Sarony in 1866, the photo shows Menken sitting at a desk, seemingly captured in a moment of determined effort in her writing. Various elements – the disarray of items on the desk, a small vase of flowers, a cup of tea – help to convey the illusion of domestic privacy, suggesting the viewer is in a privileged position of intimacy. (Harvard Theatre Collection) Given her immense popularity as a breeches performer, the fact that she is wearing an open men’s shirt and military jacket (similar to one worn by her in The French Spy) with a woman’s full skirt further suggests Menken “herself” has just come from the stage. 2 Considered in the context of Menken’s poems on performance, the scene takes on added significance. The figure is instantly recognizable as Menken the actress, who was by that time the most photographed woman in the world (Dudden 161), but also something more (or less) than contemporary theatrical fans expected. Assuming the pose of poetess in a staged display of interiority, Menken illustrates the “playful illusiveness and provocation” of performance, both embodied and written (Slinn, Victorian 70). Whether we read the figure as half-dressed or half- dressed depends on which of the two roles – actress or poet – we privilege as the more “genuine” Menken. While explicitly presenting a contrast between acting and writing, the scene implicitly engages related binaries – fiction/reality, public/domestic, female/male, appearance/interiority – complicating rather than clarifying the relations between and among them.1 In the photo, as in much of Menken’s poetry, performance is both subject matter and rhetorical mode. The highly public terms of gendered subjectivity in the period required all women to perform – both in the home and beyond – from conventional scripts provided by sentimental ideology, Christianity, and patriarchal domesticity.2 Within mid-nineteenth-century American culture, Alan Ackerman argues, “theater was understood less as a particular space than as a set of conditions”; any site – domestic, theatrical, social, textual – might function as “a kind of theater” for performing and witnessing subjectivity (xiv). Poetry provided a stage for women’s critical engagement with (and potential revision of) contemporary culture’s scripts, particularly its constructions of gender, public space, and social power. Through the writing of poetry, particularly poems representing performance, women confronted the embeddedness of cultural and social contexts within language, and its implications for their own creative acts. Thinking about the poem itself as a verbal act, rather than object, we can better understand the linguistic processes through which it produces meaning(s) and affect(s). As a verbal act taking 3 performance as its subject, women’s poetry exposes the problems and possibilities of public discourse, making explicit the mutually constitutive relations of ideologies and practices within mid-century culture. “Poetic Acts” considers the poetry of five women – canonical poets Emily Dickinson and Sarah Piatt, popular performers Fanny Kemble and Adah Menken, and Spiritualist trance lecturer Achsa Sprague – within the context of a highly performative mid-century American culture. From diverse backgrounds and widely varied experiences with public culture, each repeatedly turned to performance as subject matter and setting for poetry. Performance provided both a cultural object or event of common interest and a mode of engagement with and representation of related (but less easily communicable) ideas about subjectivity, gender, social power, and public space. Focusing on the period 1840-1880, I read representations of performance in women’s poetry through the critical frames of performance theory, cultural