WOMEN'S POETRY IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Transcription

1 WOMEN'S POETRY IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT

2 Also by Isobel Armstrong ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH ROBERT BROWNING: Writers and their Background (editor) THE MAJOR VICTORIAN POETS: Reconsiderations (editor) MANSFIELD PARK: Penguin Critical Studies NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN POETS: An Oxford Anthology (co-edited by Joseph Bristow, with Cath Sharrock) SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: Penguin Critical Studies VICTORIAN SCRUTINIES: Reviews of Poetry, VICTORIAN POETRY: Poetry, Poetics and Politics Also by Virginia Blain THE FEMINIST COMPANION TO LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Women's Writing from the Middle Ages to the Present CAROLINE BOWLES SOUTHEY: The Making of a Woman Writer Also edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain WOMEN'S POETRY, LATE ROMANTIC TO LATE VICTORIAN Gender and Genre,

3 Wotnen's Poetry in the Enlighten111ent The Making of a Canon, Edited by Isobel Armstrong Professor of English Birkbeck College University of London and Virginia Blain Associate Professor of English Macquarie University Sydney in association with Palgrave Macmillan

4 First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook) First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y ISBN Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women's poetry in the Enlightenment: the making of a canon, I edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain. p. ern. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (cloth) 1. English poetry-women authors-history and criticism. 2. Women and literature-great Britain-History-18th century. 3. Women and literature-great Britain-History-19th century. 4. English poetry-18th century-history and criticism. 5. English poetry-19th century-history and criticism. 6. Enlightenment -Great Britain. 7. Canon (Literature) I. Armstrong, Isobel. II. Blain, Virginia, PR555.W6W ' dc CIP Selection and editorial matter Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain 1999 Text Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources

5 Contents Preface vii Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain Notes on the Contributors xiii Part I The Sensuous Eighteenth Century: 1 Minds and Bodies 1 Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth-Century Women Poets 3 Margaret Anne Doody 2 'All Passion Extinguish' d': The Case of Mary Chandler, David Shuttleton 3 'A Dialogue': Elizabeth Carter's Passion for the Female Mind 50 Lisa A. Freeman Part II The Feminist Political Project 65 4 Mary Seymour Montague: Anonymity and 'Old Satyrical Codes' 67 Isobel Grundy 5 The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions of British Women's Poetry, Anne K. Mellor 6 The Politics of Vision: Anna Barbauld's 'Eighteen Hundred and Eleven' 99 Maggie Favretti v

6 vi Contents Part III Protest and Patronage 7 'This Muse-born Wonder': the Occluded Voice of Ann Yearsley, Milkwoman and Poet of Clifton Mary Waldron 8 The Maid and the Minister's Wife: literary Philanthropy in Regency York Roger Sales Part IV Remaking Genres and Subjectivities 9 Romantic Women Poets: Inscribing the Self Stuart Curran 10 Homosocial Women: Martha Sansom, Constantia Grierson, Mary Leapor and Georgie Verse Epistle Kate Lilley 11 Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains Judith Hawley Part V Finale: A Female Canon? Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology 201 Elizabeth Eger Index 216

7 Preface '[S]ome essential work has been done - the spade-work- of locating poets, finding their publications and manuscripts, and giving a coherent account of their individual lives', Margaret Anne Doody announces at the beginning of the first essay in this volume. The essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries presented here have a context in the steady work of republication, editing and anthologizing which has gone on in the past decade or so. That work, initiated by Roger Lonsdale's splendid Oxford anthology of eighteenth-century women poets in 1989, continues and will continue. Its inevitable consequence, however, is a further stage of critical investigation as new questions emerge. Some of these questions are voiced by Stuart Curran in another essay in this volume: What new models of literary history must be constructed as women's poetry is rediscovered? How do we prevent ourselves from assimilating women merely to a 'paradigm drawn up and enacted by men' and arrive at a model which genuinely reconfigures literary, intellectual and cultural understanding of the late Enlightenment? How do the intensely self-conscious developments of literary theory -New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic critique - relate to the feminist agenda of rediscovery? To meditate on these issues may well mean, as Anne K. Mellor affirms, that cherished 'hegemonic' notions concerning the public and private spheres allocated to men and women, on which so much discussion of gender and writing has been founded, have to be questioned. It was to ask, and to begin to answer, such questions that we organized an international conference, 'Rethinking Women's Poetry, ', held at Birkbeck College, University of London, in the summer of We assumed that an interrogation of the ways we read women's poetry, and the assumptions we make while reading it, would be concurrent with, and indeed indivisible from, our rediscovery of it. That was why we decided to use the word 'rethinking' rather than 'rereading'. As Curran remarks, the question '"Is it any good?" - the question I have vii

8 viii Preface been asked over and over about the literature by women that I study, read, and teach' is an ideological rather than an aesthetic question, an attempt to prevent gender from disrupting traditional structures of value. Accordingly, the five groups of essays in this book ask rather different questions. The first group considers how women's poetry reconfigures a customary epistemological binary, mind and body, revising eighteenth-century philosophical assumptions about mind and body, and probing the implications for a new understanding of social organization which follow from the questioning of this antithesis. A second group explores the feminist political project of the Enlightenment, arguing for a 'strong', ideologically radical reading of feminist politics, in terms both of gender politics and revolutionary politics. The woman poet's powerful intervention into the 'public' sphere is the theme of all three essays. A section on the politics of the patronage of working-class poets follows: despite the often coercive expectations of the patron, working-class women poets could discover forms of protest, but it is necessary to consider how their texts were nevertheless often shaped by the ideology of the patron. The fourth section is concerned with the ways women poets created and mediated feminine subjectivities through remaking traditional genres and poetic language. Lastly, the gender politics and concepts of history bound up in the making of anthologies, both eighteenth-century and contemporary, and the cultural implications of the 'canon' constructed through collections and selections, is the topic of the final section. It is appropriate to begin where we end, with our section entitled 'Finale: A Female Canon?', and remark on Elizabeth Eger's salutary essay on 'Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology', because it is in many ways both admonitory preface as well as conclusion to this collection. She traces how the anthology was a major culprit in the cultural forgetting of women poets, most notably through the omission of politically radical poets of the 1790s from nineteenth-century anthologies. If they were included, a limited representation of women's poetic activity prevailed. But, she warns, the contemporary reinstatement of women's poetry carries its own perils. It is too easy to establish women's writing as a countertradition, rather than investigating how it belonged to the central debates of its culture. In the first group of essays, 'The Sensuous Eighteenth Cen-

9 Preface ix tury: Minds and Bodies', Margaret Anne Doody takes up the challenge of cultural centrality. Women poets were as preoccupied as male poets with the perception and rendering of sense data, and were aware of the philosophical debates around sensation, she argues, in her 'Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth Century Women Poets'. But they did not assent to the hierarchical taxonomy of sensation implied by Locke, deliberately disrupting such organization for democratic purposes. Drawing on the poetry of Ann Yearsley, Mary Leapor, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, she shows that women poets not only expressed a sensuous empathy with animals (like themselves, thought to be incapable of rationality), but insistently undermined, through what she terms 'the Pythagorean theme', or the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, the whole body/ mind antithesis on which the hierarchy of rational 'man' and animals was based. Women's preoccupation with fairies and the supernatural is related to this revolutionary Pythagoreanism, because fairies are outside the cultural classifications which enable social and gender relations to be enforced, and suggest new understandings of commonality. In his "'All Passion Entinguish'd": The Case of Mary Chandler, ', David Shuttleton charts Mary Chandler's struggle with anorexia and deformity, and her attempts to find a discourse of Mind, reclaiming the rationality denied to women which would challenge the derogatory constructions of her condition current in eighteenth-century medical accounts of the female body. Lisa A. Freeman's '"A Dialogue": Elizabeth Carter's Passion for the Female Mind' explores the ways in which the Bluestocking intellectual and satirist Elizabeth Carter reverses the common association of femininity with the body by connecting the body and the irrationality of its 'lower parts' with a male speaker in her satirical poem. This lampoon radically changes social and legal codes and 'the economics of matrimonial exchange' because 'Mind' is no longer the superior Platonic provenance of masculinity. In Part II, 'The Feminist Political Project', sexual politics and radical politics are intertwined, and both are problematized, even though all three writers here ultimately claim a 'strong' radical reading of their poets. Isobel Grundy considers the pseudonymous 'Mary Seymour Montague's' An Original Essay on Woman (1771) and its challenge to Pope's Essay on Man. One of the problems to be teased out is the status of anonymity, its function as

10 X Preface political mask, and the extent to which it enables or disables a historically precise reading of the text. A defence of woman and another critique of hierarchy, how transgressive is it? Why is the scandalous celebration of the antimonarchical Catherine Macaulay followed by a conservative finale which contradicts earlier claims? In contrast to this equivocation Anne K Mellor traces an aggressive radical tradition of feminine critique among later poets in her 'The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions of British Women's Poetry, '. Though she reminds us of the middle-class, Christian patriarchal and colonial 'Anglo-Africanism' of these poets' contexts, she argues that Charlotte Smith's understanding of the devastations of war, Hannah More's anti-slavery polemics, Helen Maria Williams's attack on colonial violence, Anna Laetitia Barbauld's critique of empire, and above all the call for social revolution in Lucy Aikin's Epistles on Women (1810), with its witty rewriting of the Book of Genesis, constitute a major tradition of social critique, and opened out a unique political discourse for women. Maggie Favretti' s close historical reading of one of these texts, Anna Laetitia Barbauld' s great heroic satire 'Eighteen Hundred and Eleven' (1812), 'The Politics of Vision: Anna Barbauld' s "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven'" confirms and amplifies this case. Two essays study the politics and economics of patronage, the local history of publication which was so crucial to the visibility of the woman poet, in Part III, 'Protest and Patronage'. Mary Waldron explores the insistently restricting model of 'primitive' genius which Hannah More and her friends imposed on Ann Yearsley in '"This Muse-born Wonder": the Occluded Voice of Ann Yearsley, Milkwoman and Poet of Clifton'. Yearsley's intellectual sophistication, her scepticism about religion and rural innocence alike, and her vehement refusal to be 'humble' survived this coercion, but created constant antagonism between herself and her patrons. Roger Sales examines the way the poetry of Charlotte Richardson, domestic servant, was marketed as the work of the docile and obedient lower classes, in 'The Maid and the Minister's Wife: Literary Philanthropy in Regency York'. In what sense, he asks, does the patron's 'text' overwhelm and subsume the text it philanthropically promotes, and in what sense might we arrive at an opposite, non-conservative reading of this support as a successful attempt to assist a single parent to continue writing?

11 Preface xi From the constraints of patronage to the possibilities of selffashioning through the transformation of genre: 'Remaking Genres and Subjectivities' extends the debate to the kinds of freedoms, social and aesthetic, women could create both for themselves and interpersonally through the practice of writing. In 'Romantic Women Poets: Inscribing the Self', Stuart Curran explores the way women claimed an identity through writing, holding up to themselves a 'metascriptural' mirror, an art which traces its own coming into being. The huge increase in the numbers of women writing at this time - 'This widespread reaching of women for an overtly public status outside the domestic circle is a sociological fact' - meant that women could name their experiences, and in doing so transform as well as define them. Ranging over young women's acrostics on their own names, which 'produce' an identity and give it public status, to the community through writing which was achieved, for instance, between the blind poet Christian Gray and her predecessor Priscilla Pickering, or between the women who wrote elegies to Charlotte Smith, Curran argues for a consciously gendered discourse which implicitly dissolves the distinction between private and public spheres as the feminine is deliberately brought into the light. In her 'Homosocial Women: Martha Sansom, Constantia Grierson, Mary Leapor and Georgie Verse Epistle', Kate Lilley consolidates this claim, showing how the revisionary writing of genre creates both intertextual and interpersonal relationships between women poets. They constructed a peculiar feminine subjectivity, sociality, and homosocial bonding which depended on the recognition and modification of codes of writing embedded in Georgie. Lastly, Judith Hawley considers Charlotte Smith's very public drama of personal mourning. 'Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains' considers Smith's creation of a unique elegiac form through the sonnet. Smith is exploring a new, feminine poetics and economy of mourning, an 'art of losing', which can never be matched by repayment. It depends on prolonging grief so that the paradoxes of its psychological meaning can be perpetually examined, and on never figuring the lost object, so that closure can never repay expenditure of feeling with a resolution. These 12 essays testify to the prolific creativity of women's poetry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and to their engagement with major issues of their culture. An indication of the way women's poetry is already beginning to change our

12 xii Preface understanding of literary and historical categories is the way the essays transgress periodization and discuss groups of poets which cross the customary divide between the classifications 'eighteenthcentury' and 'Romantic', drawing attention to the artificiality of these boundaries. We have used the term 'Enlightenment' to describe the epoch under review, as one more commensurate with the projects of the woman poet of this time, and to reflect the different historical trajectory of women's poetry, so unlike the patterns of male writing. No doubt there are drawbacks to this formulation. It is to be hoped that our categories will be interrogated in their turn. These essays are a contribution to a work of interpretation and analysis which has only just begun, and which will transform our understanding of literary culture and history in ways yet to be understood.!sobel ARMSTRONG VIRGINIA BLAIN

13 Notes on the Contributors lsobel Armstrong has been Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London, since 1989, following a 10-year period as Professor of English at the University of Southampton. She has written widely on nineteenth-century fiction, poetry and feminist theory, and has recently co-edited an authoritative anthology of women's poetry of the nineteenth century. Virginia Blain is an Associate Professor of English at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Edinburgh. She co-authored The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women's Writing from the Middle Ages to the Present (1990) and has produced several scholarly editions of nineteenth-century texts. She is an associate editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature. Her latest book is Caroline Bowles Southey: The Making of a Woman Writer (1998). She has published a number of articles on Victorian women poets and is currently working on a study of the hermaphroditic impulse in Victorian poetry. Stuart Curran, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and author, among other critical studies, of Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986), has also edited Poems of Charlotte Smith (1993), Mary Shelley's Valperga (1997), and Frankenstein: The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition (1998). Margaret Anne Doody, a graduate of Oxford, is currently Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. Her publications include Aristotle Detective; The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered; and Frances Burney: The Life in the Works. Her most recent book is The True Story of the Novel. She is currently writing a book on hymns and sacred songs. xiii

14 xiv Notes on the Contributors Elizabeth Eger is a research fellow at the Warwick Eighteenth Century Centre, University of Warwick, working on The Luxury Project. She is currently writing a literary and cultural history of Richard Samuel's painting The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (1779), which explores the link between the sister arts and sister artists of the period. She is editor of Selected Works of Elizabeth Montagu for Pickering & Chatto' s forthcoming edition of bluestocking writers. She has reviewed for the TLS and Woman: A Cultural Review, and is editor of Inverse, a magazine of contemporary poetry and visual art. Maggie Favretti has been teaching secondary-school European and American history for 12 years. She currently teaches at Scarsdale High School, outside New York City. She completed her BA in art history at Yale University, and her MA in English at Middlebury College. She has been the recipient of two regional teaching awards, serves on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the college Board's Academic Advisory Council. Lisa A. Freeman is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently writing a book on genre and character in eighteenth-century English drama. lsobel Grundy studied for her BA and DPhil at Oxford. She is now Henry Marshall Tory Professor in the English Department at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. She has published on Samuel Johnson, Virginia Woolf, and women writers of the eighteenth century, especially Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She has edited Montagu's Essays and Poems (Oxford, 1977; revised edn 1993), Romance Writings (Oxford, 1996), and Selected Letters (Penguin, 1997), and has a new biography to be published in She is a member of the Orlando Project, centred at the University of Alberta. Judith Hawley is a lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published articles on eighteenth-century women writers and edited Jane Collier's The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1994). As well as preparing a book on late eighteenthcentury gender and literary relations, she is also interested in learned literature. She has published articles on Laurence Sterne

15 Notes on the Contributors XV and is working on a book called The Circle of Arts and Sciences: Literature and Encyclopedism in the Eighteenth Century. Her Penguin edition of Henry Fielding's 'Joseph Andrews' and 'Shamela' is forthcoming. Kate Lilley teaches in the English Department at the University of Sydney. She edited The Blazing World and other Writings by Margaret Cavendish (1994) and her essays on seventeenth-century women's elegy and utopian writing have appeared in Women Writing History, (1992) and Women, Texts and Histories, (1992). She is currently completing a book on rhetoric, gender and pedagogy in early modern women's writing. Anne K. Mellor is Professor of English and Women's Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of many books and articles on English Romanticism, including Blake's Human Form Divine, English Romantic Irony, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, and Romanticism and Gender. She edited the canon-transforming anthology of English Romantic writing, British Literature, , as well as Romanticism and Feminism and The Other Mary Shelley. She is currently writing a study of women's political writing in the Romantic era, Mothers of the Nation. Roger Sales is Professor of English Literature in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, and also Dean of the School. His recent publications include Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (1994). He has also written a number of articles and chapters on working-class poetry, which was the subject of his PhD thesis at Cambridge in He is currently working on two projects: a short biography of John Clare and a more detailed study, provisionally entitled Servants and Society in the Regency Period. David Shuttleton lectures in eighteenth-century literature, gender theory and British cinema in the English Department, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published several articles on eighteenth-century topics, while his principal research interest in early Georgian medico-literary culture is represented by his essay on Dr George Chyne in Medicine in the Enlightenment, edited by Roy Porter. He is currently writing a book entitled Queer Pastoral: Nature, Homosexuality and Modernity.

16 xvi Notes on the Contributors Mary Waldron's main interests lie in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially among women writers. Her Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton: The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, , appeared in She has also published on the same writer in the journals Age of Johnson (1990) and Women's Writing (1996). Her essays on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1994) and Studies in the Novel (1996) respectively, and she is currently writing a book-length study of Austen's engagement with other fiction of her time. She lectures part-time for the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Essex.