Recent Criticism of the Poetess: A Review Essay

In the past ten years, there has been a flurry of critical attention devoted to the poetess and the development of women’s writing in general. Tricia Lootens’s richly detailed text Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization explores the process of canonization in relation to gender and emphasizes the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti in particular. For Lootens, the attempts to canonize women poets amounted to assuring their disappearance. Canonization for women rested upon a “radically ahistorical” notion of the “genius of woman” which was entirely separate from the Romantic “poet-hero” status men achieved via canonization. The result for women, then, was vacancy: “if their literary ‘relics’ were revered, it was not as embodiments but as representations of a transcendent and definitively absent feminine glory” (Lootens 10). This feminine worship simply served to subsume individual women poets, erasing them even as their work achieved some popularity. In addition to this vacancy that occurred, Lootens argues that for one woman to achieve canonization—Rossetti, for example—meant the decanonization of her predecessor—Barrett Browning. In other words, only one woman poet could establish herself at a time. This competition between the two poets that ultimately leads to the valorization of one over the other, continues today. If currently Rossetti retains a “feminine purity” that “renders her a useful symbol in struggles against the professionalization and politicization of women’s writing” (Lootens 12), then Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese are now “retroactively packaged as the ultimate Victorian valentines” standing for “old-fashioned romance and marriage” (12). By comparing the process of canonization that both women’s work has undergone, Lootens illustrates how historical gender biases, such as the separate-spheres ideology, affected and continues to affect their reception histories. In Victorian Sappho Yopie Prins picks up where Lootens left off in analyzing our institutionalized forgetfulness of women writers: Prins’s meticulous study of nineteenth-century women writers – meticulous both in its attention to history and to formal detail – contains the often cited (and once reprinted) chapter, “Sappho Doubled: Michael Field,” an essay about two women writers who published poetry under this man’s name. The chapter of her book that gives it its name demonstrates how Victorian poetesses deployed the figure of Sappho to enact over and over again the loss of the poetess, again, as “a means of literary transmission.” That forgetting the poetess must be a mechanism for de-canonizing (Lootens) and simultaneously transmitting (Prins) poetess poetry is convincing precisely because of the oddity of the figure’s intense popularity during her time, compared to its subsequent effacement from canonical anthologies. In “The Victorian Poetess” Susan Brown addresses the popularity of both L.E.L. and Felicia Hemans during the late nineteenth century as well as the current resurgence of their work due to feminist interest and recovery projects. She also focuses on the difficulty many feminists have in utilizing the word and in studying works by “poetesses” in general. Indeed, she begins her essay by asking why any feminist would “praise the figure of the poetess” citing current views of the word as “unequivocally patronizing” (180). She then proceeds to historicize the use of the word, providing a more complicated reading of how the word was used for Victorian women poets in, perhaps, a less oppressive way than we currently would consider it to be. For Hemans and L.E.L. in particular, Brown argues, this poetess figure “took the form of a self-consciously feminine self-staging in verse that appropriated many bodies, lives and identities” (184). For Brown, then, and for many contemporary critics rethinking the term, there is a productive multiplicity in the work of the Victorian …