Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900
288
Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900
288Paperback
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Overview
Far from restricting their poems to the domestic and personal, these women addressed a significant array of political issues—abolition, Indian removals, economic and racial injustice, the Civil War, and, not least, their own changing status as civil subjects. Overflowing with a wealth of heretofore untapped information, their poems demonstrate conclusively that "ordinary" nineteenth-century women were far more influenced by the women's rights movement than historians have allowed. In showing how these women turned the sentimental and ideologically saturated conventions of the period's verse to their own ends, Bennett argues passionately and persuasively for poetry's power as cultural and political discourse. As much women's history as literary history, this book invites readers to rethink not only the role that nineteenth-century women played in their own emancipation but the role that poetry plays in cultural life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691026442 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/06/2003 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
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Poets in the Public Sphere
The Emancipatory Project of American Women's Poetry, 1800-1900Introduction
POETRY IN THE PUBLIC SPHEREFor poetry is itself one form of social activity, and no proper understanding of the nature of poetry can be made if the poem is abstracted from the experience of the poem either at its point of origin or at any subsequent period. -Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections, 1985
On June 5, 1850, the Louisville Weekly Journal published "To My Child" by an author who signed him- or herself "S." No editorial explanation accompanied the poem, only a notice indicating that it was written for the Journal; that is, it was an original submission, not a reprint. In the poem, a female speaker bids good-bye to her child. She does not explain why they are parting, but a number of possibilities occur. The child is illegitimate, and the mother's relatives (?) are forcing her to give it up. The mother is a divorcée, who under the law of coverture has no rights to her child, or a widow, unable to support it. She could be a prostitute or criminal from whom the child is taken for its own good or a slave whose child has been sold away. More remotely, she could even be a Native American whose child is leaving forsome far-off boarding school, where its ties to her and to tribal culture will be systematically destroyed.
Whatever narrative one invents-and historically speaking, any of these scenarios could apply-one thing is clear: the poem's speaker has had her deepest maternal feelings violated. Enraged by the forced separation, she lashes out not just against the "the Father's Law" but against the "'father to the fatherless,'" God. From her opening apostrophe to her concluding peroration, the speaker of "To My Child" resists her breaking, refusing to display the grief she feels lest her tears gratify those who injure her. Her willingness to "kiss the chastening rod" a thing of the past, she teases out for herself what remains of her relationship to the Almighty instead:
Farewell! I will not part from thee in sadness and in tears, Nor darken this, our parting hour, with vain and fruitless fears; Though long and weary years may pass, ere we shall meet again, I will not lose the present hour in tears as weak as vain. Sweet baby! come and lean thy head upon my aching heart, And let me look into thine eyes, one moment, ere we part, And smile as thou art wont to smile in thy young childish glee, That so thy joy may reach the heart that bleeds to part from thee. No grief shall mark my death-cold brow, no sorrow dim my eye, In bidding thee a last adieu when other eyes are by; But here, with none but God and thee to witness, let me tell How bleeds the heart, that seems so cold, in bidding thee farewell! We are alone, my sweetest child, no friend is left us now, Save Him who blesses every tear that falls upon thy brow; And He will bless thee evermore, for He has sworn to be "A father to the fatherless"-then will He care for thee! I leave thee with a breaking heart, a dry and aching eye, For none may know the thoughts that swell within my soul so high; I press thee in a last embrace-and can't it be the last? Can all the love I felt for thee be but as shadows past? I have bent o'er thy little form, when cradled on my breasts, Thy dark eye softly folded in its sweet, unbroken rest, And my wild heart has gone above in gratitude to God, And I have bowed in spirit there, and kissed His chastening rod! My child! if in this breaking heart one feeling lingers still, Which anguish hath not changed to gall, nor wrong hath made an ill, It is the deep, redeeming love that fills my heart for thee, And forms the last link, yet unrent, between my God and me! (NAWP 419-20)
For a poem so thoroughly Victorian in form, metrics, and style, "To My Child" raises a surprising number of un-"Victorian" questions. Most obviously, given the aura of sexual guilt hanging over the speaker, the poem seems an odd choice for a family newspaper, let alone one found so far from a major cosmopolitan center. Then there is the date, 1850. This places "To My Child"'s composition squarely in the middle of what Douglas Branch dubs the "Sentimental Years," 1836 to 1860, when, we are told, domestic ideology was in full flower and the "empire of the mother" uncontested terrain. Yet, for all that the speaker of this poem is a mother, she is hardly sentimentalized. With her "wild heart" and stubborn will, she is no Ellen Montgomery, eagerly embracing her own humiliation, or Uncle Tom, forgiving those who kill him. If anything, the literary figure she resembles most is Hawthorne's erring-and-proud-of-it Hester Prynne. And if this mother, as she repeatedly says, sheds no tears-those certain signifiers of the sentimental persona-then how can we? Why, that is, does this poem invoke so many sentimental conventions-the erring mother, the innocent babe, the hoped-for redemption-only to disappoint them in the end? Why refuse the consolation of sentimental closure? Put another way, why the "yet" before the "unrent"?
Then there is the mother herself. Neither Southern Belle nor True Woman, neither Bluestocking nor Coquette, certainly no Angel in the House, who is she? Prostitute, criminal, divorcée, pauperized widow, illegitimate mother, slave-any of these subject positions might fit, but which is hers? And how should we view her? Is she a sinner or one sinned against? Is her child a sign of her guilt or, as she herself insists, her only hope for salvation, a salvation others jeopardize? Why, moreover, does she repeatedly insist in this most public of private spaces-the anonymous newspaper poem-that she will never let anyone know her pain? Is this a poem in which, as T. S. Eliot puts it, the poet talks "to himself, or to nobody"? Or is it a complaint, one whose very inwardness is transformed by the mere fact of publication into a vehicle for public work? In revealing the "injustice perpetrated against the speaker, or something the speaker represents," does this poem implicitly demand redress? Indeed, if it is not the mother's complaint that matters here but its publication, what do we make of this fact? Whoever the author was, what did she (or he) hope to accomplish by placing such an ironic yet seemingly intimate and pain-filled work before the public eye?
I have chosen "To My Child" to open this study of American women poets in the public sphere, from 1800 to 1900, not because I have answers to these questions but because I do not. Indeed, I think many unanswerable, beginning with the author's sex. What makes this poem central for me is not what it says about one poet's concerns or even about one legally unentitled mother's plight, important though these matters are, but that it was published at all. As much by its provenance in a regional newspaper as by its resistance to closure, "To My Child" challenges key scholarly assumptions about nineteenth-century U.S. women and the poetry they wrote. Most especially, in publicizing one woman's (possible) transgressive behavior and (certain) tortured grief, "To My Child" suggests that the production of lyric poetry by nineteenth-century U.S. women may have more political significance than feminist literary and political historians have granted it to date.
"To My Child's" publicity comprises this study's departure point and one of its principal concerns. Despite differences in theoretical framework, most mainstream twentieth-century Anglo-American literary scholars have, at least until recently, followed Eliot in situating lyric poetry within a late-Victorian/ early modernist aesthetic of high culture. The unstable product of a forced marriage between Matthew Arnold's liberal humanism and elite pre-Rapha-elite aestheticism, this concept of poetry-the poet speaking "to himself, or to nobody"-sought to preserve poetic autonomy and authenticity against the devaluating impact that mass-market technologies were presumably having on popular taste. Like the Victorians, modernists insisted that art should transcend immediate and material concerns. Identified thus, as quasi-private or overheard speech largely devoted to meditative concerns-Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," for example-lyric poetry's other function as a "social activity" was restricted, at least in theory, to the poem's engagements with other texts in the same free-standing literary tradition.
For such a model, one predicated on lyric poetry's transcendent status as aesthetic artifact, the figure of apostrophe-the direct address of an absent presence-has been taken, as Barbara Johnson takes it in "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," as paradigmatic of lyric poetry's self-enclosed, intra-subjective nature as a whole. In an intricate argument to which I cannot do justice here, Johnson identifies lyric poetry as a literature of "demand," articulating "the primal relation to the mother as a relation to the Other," as in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," for example, or Dickinson's many poems to her "Master," a figure whose actual biographical reality remains moot. Intrusive in its peremptoriness, the speaker's voice commands what otherwise does not exist into being, animating it, as the voice in "S's" poem animates her lost child. Viewed thus, lyric poetry is an internal drama of desire linguistically acted out. As such, it maintains tenuous ties at best to anything outside the author's head except those precursor texts to which it is generically related-whether Petrarch's sonnets or, as in the case of "To My Child," other women's complaint poems.
In valorizing a poem like "To My Child" as public speech, I am not denying lyric poetry's status as aesthetic artifact any more than I am denying apostrophe's importance to lyric production as a whole. Like "To My Child," many, possibly most, of the poems cited in this book address themselves to a someone or something not there, using the rhetorical conventions, whether satirical or sentimental, of their day. But even when structured apostrophically, poems, I would suggest, engage other, less theoretically abstract, audiences as well: a specific interpretive community, a magazine's readership, a biographically identifiable individual, other authors to whom the particular poet responds, a coterie of the author's friends, and so on. And it is the specific ways in which poems relate to these other, more concrete and historically specific audiences that concerns me here.
In this book, I bracket the text-based intrapsychic approach which using the apostrophic model enables in order to call attention to a body of poetry, largely complaint poems, whose social, cultural, and political affiliations give them historical value outside the aesthetic. Decontextualized or, as Jerome McGann puts it, "abstracted" from the specific social and material conditions which produced it, including the historically specific audiences to which individual poems are addressed, lyric poetry has, or seems to have, little to say to those concerned with the "cultural work" that literature does. Scholarly interest in poetry has consequently steeply declined in the past few decades as literary theorists have shifted from viewing culture as text to viewing it, in Danky and Wiegand's terms, as "agency and practice." Resituating nineteenth-century American women's newspaper and periodical poetry within the tradition of social dialogue and debate from which it sprang and to which it belongs, will clarify this poetry's function as a form of public speech addressed to concrete, empirically identifiable others. Doing so, it will establish the vital role that women's poetry, taken collectively, played within the intersubjective framework of the public sphere.
Drawing examples principally from national, regional, and special-interest newspapers and periodicals published between 1800 and 1900, I examine nineteenth-century American women's poetry in terms of what the German social philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, calls "everyday communicative practise." That is, I treat this poetry as an instance of speech whose expressive and mimetic power is organized explicitly or implicitly for argumentative ends-in order to achieve a practical discursive goal: persuasion. In this poetic form of speech, the author produces aesthetic pleasure, typically, as in "To My Child," through manipulation of affect. However, this pleasure is not an end in itself any more than is the poem's expressive function, the sheer personal voicing of complaint or injustice. Rather, as in "To My Child," both pleasure and expressivity are put in service to swaying the judgments of others on matters of concern to all-in this poem, a mother's violated rights.
Obviously, not all nineteenth-century women's poetry fits this description. Much of the genteel poetry collected by nineteenth-century anthologists like Griswold and Stedman encouraged aestheticization along with (the illusion of) personal expressivity; and the conventions governing such poems have been richly explored by scholars like Mary Loeffelholz, Elizabeth Petrino, Adela Pinch, Yopie Prins, Eliza Richards, and Cheryl Walker. But, at the same time, a substantial amount of nineteenth-century poetry by both sexes is directed implicitly or explicitly toward social and political concerns, the concerns of the Habermasian public sphere: building solidarity in particular racial and ethnic communities, questioning prevailing ideologies or laws, criticizing national policy-for example, the removal of indigenous Indian populations-and so on. In these poems, the boundaries between the aesthetic and the political and between the sentimental and the ironic are breached as genteel poetry's rhetorical conventions are twisted to meet complaint poetry's reformist ends.
In the poetry I discuss, white women and women of color, coming from every caste and class, region and religion, address the major social and political issues of their day and those of special interest to themselves, their own entry into modernity not least among them. As a result, we can use their poems to track not only women's opinions on a broad range of social and political questions but also fundamental shifts in their own self-definition as the century progressed. In the brief space of these poems-poems which, when added together, represent thousands of differently sited individual women-nineteenth-century women spoke out on who they thought they were and what they wanted for themselves and for their society. These are the issues that I explore here, treating their poetry as a specific form of communicative utterance directed toward real-world, or what Habermas calls "life-world," effects, by reaching "into our cognitive interpretations and normative expectations" in order to make us rethink and modify what we believe and do. Although this book is about poetry, therefore, finally, it is even more about the women who wrote it and the political and cultural work their poetry did.
The best way for me to establish the cultural importance of the poetic praxis this book discusses is to describe, however briefly, the eighteenth-century publishing practices out of which it evolved. Newspapers had hardly started to appear in the colonies (circa the mid-1720s) when literate middle-and upper-class women began using them as venues for self-representation and public suasion on issues pertinent to themselves. Since early colonial newspapers were mainly devoted to disseminating commercial and political news, it seems likely that publishers viewed these female-authored complaints as harmless filler or else as cost-free ways to create community appeal. But whatever the case, by the mid-1730s, the spaces where women's writing appeared-typically, letter and poetry columns-had become the designated public sites for the discussion of gender issues. In these sites, male and female writers, often directly rebutting each other, established an ongoing practice of gender debate that in various guises would persist right through the next century and was crucial, this book will argue, to the success of the women's rights movement in the United States.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poets in the Public Sphere by Paula Bernat Bennett Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xv
Introduction: Poetry in the Public Sphere 1
PART ONE
1. Literary Sentimentality and the Genteel Lyric 17
2. High Sentimentality and the Politics of Reform 40
3. The Politics and Poetics of Difference 62
4. Harper, Parnell, Lazarus, and Johnson 86
PART TWO
5. Domestic Gothic and Sentimental Parody 113
6. Irony's Edge: Sarah Piatt and the Postbellum Speaker 135
7. Sex, Sexualities, and Female Erotic Discourse 159
8. Making It New in the Fin de Si?cle 181
Coda: After 1910 205
Notes 217
Index 253
What People are Saying About This
This ambitious and substantial work makes a significant contribution to an emerging field that Bennett herself helped bring into being. There is no doubt that this book will be the most important single survey of nineteenth-century American women's verse yet to appear. It also clearly advances American feminist scholarship by turning its attention to the poetry heretofore neglected in favor of the period's prose.
— Virginia Jackson, New York University
Elegantly and carefully written, this is a genuinely innovative and ground-breaking work that provides us with new ways of reading a whole period of American literary history. Every single scholar concerned with American poetry will want to read it.
— Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
"This ambitious and substantial work makes a significant contribution to an emerging field that Bennett herself helped bring into being. There is no doubt that this book will be the most important single survey of nineteenth-century American women's verse yet to appear. It also clearly advances American feminist scholarship by turning its attention to the poetry heretofore neglected in favor of the period's prose."—Virginia Jackson, New York University"Elegantly and carefully written, this is a genuinely innovative and ground-breaking work that provides us with new ways of reading a whole period of American literary history. Every single scholar concerned with American poetry will want to read it."—Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana