Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America
258
Poisonous Muse: The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America
258eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
This difference in outcome doesn’t mean that poisonous women didn’t preoccupy Americans. In the decades following Andrew Jackson’s first presidential bid, Americans buzzed over women who used poison to kill men. They produced and devoured reams of ephemeral newsprint, cheap trial transcripts, and sensational “true” pamphlets, as well as novels, plays, and poems. Female poisoners served as crucial elements in the literary manifestos of writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to George Lippard and the cheap pamphleteer E. E. Barclay, but these characters were given a strangely positive spin, appearing as innocent victims, avenging heroes, or engaging humbugs.
The reason for this poison predilection lies in the political logic of metaphor. Nineteenth-century Britain strove to rein in democratic and populist movements by labeling popular print “poison” and its providers “poisoners,” drawing on centuries of established metaphor that negatively associated poison, women, and popular speech or writing. Jacksonian America, by contrast, was ideologically committed to the popular—although what and who counted as such was up for serious debate. The literary gadfly John Neal called on his fellow Jacksonian writers to defy British critical standards, saying, “Let us have poison.” Poisonous Muse investigates how they answered, how they deployed the figure of the female poisoner to theorize popular authorship, to validate or undermine it, and to fight over its limits, particularly its political, gendered, and racial boundaries.
Poisonous Muse tracks the progress of this debate from approximately 1820 to 1845. Uncovering forgotten writers and restoring forgotten context to well-remembered authors, it seeks to understand Jacksonian print culture from the inside out, through its own poisonous language.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384043 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 258 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Poisonous Muse
The Female Poisoner and the Framing of Popular Authorship in Jacksonian America
By Sara L. Crosby
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 the University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-404-3
CHAPTER 1
The British Lamia
Although Jacksonian Americans would appropriate the poisonous woman to battle over popular authorship, the rules of the fight were laid down in Britain, most starkly in the conflict between John Keats and the critics. Keats belonged to the radical second generation of Romantics clustered around political firebrand Leigh Hunt and his Examiner. Labeled Cockneys by their opponents for their supposed plebeian, metropolitan origins, this small group of writers considered themselves a profoundly "oppositional" association, devoted to "resistance to established power," and they used their writing to advocate for a weakening of class hierarchies and an extension of democracy, particularly in literary culture. Their Tory critics, by contrast, rallied to protect privilege and an exclusionary version of literature.
In 1818 these critics fired off the war's most infamous salvo when they blasted Endymion, the epic romance by the Cockneys' ingénue, Keats. Anonymous reviewers from the Quarterly and Blackwood's mocked the poem's lush style and its poet's democratic politics and working-class background. Blackwood's Z, for instance, sneered that Endymion was nonsensical "rhapsody" and sniffed that poetry should be written by "men of power," but that Keats was one of the "uneducated and flimsy striplings" associated with women and the serving classes, the "farm-servants ... unmarried ladies ... our very footmen ... [and] governess[es]." Like his disenfranchised peers, he should go "back to the shop" and leave writing to his betters.
This criticism became notorious because Keats's friends (and enemies) crafted the popular legend that such cruel reviews fatally wounded the youth's sensitive soul, precipitating his rapid physical decline and death from tuberculosis three years later. The poet's own letters, however, tell a very different story. Keats does not present himself as a devastated invalid but rather as a thoughtful and canny rhetorician strategizing through the contradiction that the Endymion kerfuffle presented: that democratic sentiments do not always lead to literary popularity. As he explained to his brother George, he expected the conservative vitriol, but he had hoped that the broader audience would see through the reviews' prejudiced and politically motivated distortions and "that when people saw, as they must do now, all the trickery and iniquity of these Plagues [the reviews] they would scout them." They would scorn the reactionary critics and read his work anyway, "but no they [the readers] are like the spectators at the Westminster cock-pit — they like the battle and do not care who wins or loses."
Keats's complaint sounds remarkably modern, like a frustrated Marxist grumbling over false consciousness or a leftist today wondering why poor and working people vote for right-wing candidates who operate against their economic interests. Cognitive theorists who have investigated this same issue have argued that, contrary to Enlightenment belief, people do not shape their behavior according to reasoned self-interest but rather make decisions based upon more emotive and associational factors, particularly the frames to which they ascribe. Winning popularity for one's position or aesthetic, then, becomes a battle of frames, not reason, in which the winning side reframes an issue by getting the public to accept its metaphors rather than the opposition's. What Keats discovered is that people also like their metaphors to come out swinging. Not only do they "like the battle," they like to play at domination and identify with power, and so it behooves a smart rhetorician to associate whatever he or she is advocating with power of some sort.
Although Keats did not use the language of cognitive theory, he resolved his conundrum over how to craft popular literature with a strategy that sounded a great deal like this kind of empowering reframing. Previous to his critical savaging, he had embraced an authorial passivity that invited reader interpretation rather than "battle," but in the wake of the Endymion disaster he realized that "what they [the readers] want is a sensation of some sort." The reviews had dismissed his poetry by insisting that it had failed to produce this powerful effect because of the ineluctable equation between leftist politics/women/workers and aesthetic weakness, but rather than abandoning his democratic affiliations and trying to remake himself into one of the "men of power" (as Wordsworth had), Keats decided to challenge that equation with a new kind of text. He told George that he based his hope for success on "a short poem I have composed lately call'd 'Lamia,'" asserting that "I am certain there is that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way — give them either pleasant or unpleasant sensation."
One of the key things that made Lamia different, that gave it "fire," was its peculiar heroine. Whereas Keats's critics connected him with the feminine and used that to disallow his aesthetic quality, he responded by building a poem around a venomous snake-woman who combined femininity and beauty with power. He then placed her in a fatal contest with a nasty old philosopher that recapitulated the cockfight between the Cockneys and the reviewers, but in a way that infused his democratic politics and aesthetics with the power and agonistic drama people crave. In so doing, Keats gave us the most influential modern rendition of the Romantic poisoner: a reconfiguring of the evil and abject supernatural woman so that she becomes an appealing and almost heroic figure, one who battles the man of power to validate outsider authorship and an audience-centric aesthetic.
The Lamia
Keats's choice of the lamia was no simple coincidence. She was a crucial early figure linking the ideas of poison, woman, and popular print, and the antebellum authors this book examines will return again and again to the lamia as a ground upon which they form their own depictions of the female poisoner and visions of popular authorship. In European literature, in particular, the venomous snake-woman had long served as an important vehicle for arguments over popular speech and writing. Depending on the point a writer wished to make, she could appear as an extreme exemplum of the monstrous and poisonous feminine or as an idealized embodiment of romantic love betrayed. The first narrative tradition reinforced a Netflix antidemocratic political and aesthetic agenda that limited legitimate public discourse to select authorized speakers (and justified gender and class hierarchies), while the second minority tradition instead accompanied arguments for the loosening of such restraints.
The lamia of the first narrative is rooted in old cultural anxieties about abjection, that unsettling blurring of bodily and social boundaries signaling mortality and loss of personal and social control. In ancient Greece and Rome, the lamia most often served as a kind of bogeyman of this fear, a warning and object lesson in the consequences of abjection untamed. The very word lamia means "shark" or "gullet," and, as this etymology suggests, the creature was associated with a lack of discipline over orifices such as the mouth, vagina, or anus, which resulted in a horrifically inappropriate use of them. In Roman literature, for instance, she appeared as a dirty hermaphroditic witch who raped young men, while in Greek folklore she was a nastily amorphous beast-woman who slithered into nurseries to guzzle the blood of newborns. And since one end of the digestive tract inevitably leads to the other, this inappropriate ingestion resulted in tremendous stinking flatulence capable of incapacitating an unwary bystander.
This disgusting monster's association with the abjection of orifices also connected it to another use of the mouth: speech, particularly public words that seemed to violate class hierarchies and gender boundaries. As such, the lamia was a powerful rhetorical tool for limiting the democratic dissemination of public discourse. For instance, when the Greek satirist Aristophanes wanted to blast the political speeches of Cleon, a populist parvenu, it made perfect sense for him to compare the rhetorician to the lamia. In Wasps:
He had a voice like sewers in full flood, and the stench Of a sick seal or the unwashed balls of the wench Lamia, the epicene witch, or a camel's rump.
Or, in Peace,
... from his throat issued a raging Sewer in spate and the stink of a rotting seal or the sweaty Crotch of a Lamia or end of a camel.
Through the lamia, Aristophanes could equate Cleon's use of language to rise above his station with an incursion of the most disgusting abjection. He suggests that, like the lamia, the lower-class man who presumed to cross into elite politics perverted the use of the mouth. He mixed the low into the high and so abjected words — transforming them into feces that contaminated public discourse. This contamination reversed the natural top-down flow of both bodily fluids and language. It figured as foul liquid bubbling up from below — an overflowing sewer, the ooze percolating through a corpse's skin, or sweat and effluvia from the genital and anal nether regions of a hermaphrodite.
As the lamia advanced into the Christian era, she became even more tightly associated with destructive, outsider discourse, but with a new emphasis on women. She was blended with the Hebrews' demonic baby-killer turned succubus, Lilith, and this synthesis altered the focus of the lamia's abjection from gluttony and fecal uncleanness to feminine sexuality and deception, particularly deceptive language. The lamia's modus operandi shifted accordingly, and she went from chewing up newborns to seducing and devouring young men whose libidinal weakness kept them from fleeing the honeyed feminine tongue for the true words and authority of male elders.
The most influential narrative of this retooled lamia and the version most important to Keats appears in Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana (c. 220–230 CE). (This Philostratian lamia was also important to the Jacksonian authors in this book, since she provided the basis for the antebellum era's poisonous "painted woman" that they consistently worked to refute and replace with the Democratic or Romantic poisoner.) In Philostratus's account, the Christlike philosopher, Apollonius, once "caught and overcame a lamia in Corinth" who had taken on the guise of a beautiful woman in order to "fatten up [the young student of philosophy] Menippus with pleasures before devouring his body, for it was her habit to feed upon young and beautiful bodies, because their blood is pure and strong." When Mennipus introduces his cannibalistic fiancée to Apollonius, Philostratus portrays the ensuing contest between the philosopher and the lamia as a battle between true and false words. The lamia insults Apollonius, ordering him to "'cease your ill-omened talk and begone'; ... and in fact she was inclined to rail at philosophers and say that they always talked nonsense." But she fails to silence him, and Apollonius "insisted and would not let her off" until she "confess[ed] what she really was," that is, he forced her to speak the truth of her monstrous identity, at which point Menippus wisely returns to celibacy and his preceptor's tutelage. With this little moral fable, the lamia became a warning against privileging mutual, heterosocial relations over top-down, homosocial authority and so nicely complemented the early Christian Church's efforts to establish a celibate, all-male hierarchy.
If the lamia had simply remained a horrific monster of authoritarian propaganda like this, it is unlikely she would have held much appeal for Keats, but before he got hold of her, a second narrative line appeared to challenge the Philostratian tale and reframe the lamia as an innocent victim of tyranny. For instance, Keats's source text, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), claimed to recount Philostratus's tale, yet his vignette significantly romanticized the lamia. Most obviously, Burton left out the earlier story's central problem (that the lamia intends to eat Menippus), and he changes the contest of words between lamia and philosopher so that it is no longer a clear battle between lies and truth. Appearing in a chapter with the rather enchanting title, "Love's Power and Extent," Burton's lamia behaves like a noble lady in love. Whereas Philostratus portrays the lamia as verbally aggressive and emotionally deceitful — she "railed," "pretended to be disgusted at what she heard," and then "pretended to weep" — Burton's lamia genuinely weeps rather than "pretends" and entreats rather than insults: "When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant." Philostratus says nothing about the lamia vanishing. We can only assume she stomped away in disgruntled defeat. Burton, however, makes clear that Apollonius forces her to dissolve along with the luxurious illusions she created. She becomes more clearly a victim, while the philosopher's brave insistence degenerates into stubborn hardheartedness, and the "truth" of his words seems more cruel than clear.
Burton's romanticization of the lamia was seconded by another of Keats's immediate sources: the classical dictionary compiled by the English academician, John Lemprière, and published in 1788. Failing to reference the vague grossness of Aristophanes's lamia, Lemprière describes lamiae as appealing serpent-women: They were "monsters of Africa, who had the face and breast of a woman, and the rest of their body like that of a serpent." Although he acknowledges the lamias' penchant for devouring "strangers" or "children," he focuses on their seductive properties, maintaining that "their hissings were pleasing and agreeable" and that they "allured" and "enticed" their victims, sometimes "under the form of a beautiful woman." He further enhances this poetic image by recounting a heartrending version of the lamia's origin story: "According to some, the fable of the Lamiae is derived from the amours of Jupiter with a certain beautiful woman called Lamia, whom the jealousy of Juno rendered deformed, and whose children she destroyed; upon which Lamia became insane, and so desperate that she eat up all the children that came in her way." In this narrative, Lamia's monstrosity — her cannibalism and deformity — resulted from "desperate" madness caused by the torture inflicted on her by a cruel tyrant, and she becomes a star-crossed victim for the sake of love.
This sympathetic revision of the lamia accompanied a stronger association between the lamia and the serpent (as opposed to the plethora of beastly or vampiric attributes she had in her earliest incarnations), a development that suggests an intervening medieval influence. The Catholic Church held tremendous sway over medieval European writing and philosophy, including its conceptualizations of evil. As the Church calcified into a hierarchy shaped around the exclusion of women, the snake/woman association generated from the story of Eve's temptation came to replace the more extensive bestiary of the ancients as a figuration for evil. This snake-woman construct not only supported the Church's celibate patriarchy but also exemplified the human corruption that justified its temporal power. The medieval romance, by contrast, emerged from the heart of embryonic nation-states, the aristocratic courts. Considered one of the first examples of modern "popular literature," the genre developed as a counter-hegemonic discourse, an expression of secular, vernacular, and sometimes feminized writing in opposition to the Church's sacred, Latinate, homosocial, and hierarchical textual monopoly. This oppositional discourse extended, not surprisingly, to the representation of evil, and, in 1393, the French poet Jean d'Arras penned a romance that challenged the demonized snake-woman figure.
Drawing on oral tradition, Roman de Mélusine is a counternarrative that reimagines the lamia, focusing, like the Church, on the snake-woman but pouring her into the romance and so transforming her into a riposte to Apollonius that foreshadows the early modern lamia in both physical description and function. According to D'Arras, the Lusignan dynasty was founded when the noble Raymond meets and weds the mysterious Mélusine, who helps him win his estate, provides him with ten remarkable male heirs, and plans and builds his castles. However, before their union, he had agreed to one condition: he would allow Mélusine inviolable privacy every Saturday. But Raymond's meddling brother needles him constantly about the prohibition and urges him to spy on his wife. One Saturday, he gives in and peeks at his wife and discovers her "fro the nauel dounward in lykenes of a grete serpent (see fig. 1)."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poisonous Muse by Sara L. Crosby. Copyright © 2016 the University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.