Introduction: The Victorian Poetess Debates: Patterns, Paradoxes, Provocations

Introduction:The Victorian Poetess Debates: Patterns, Paradoxes, Provocations Marjorie Stone (bio) "It is essential to remember that Emily Dickinson was a poetess," Elsa Greene bravely asserted in 1972, despite modern readers being "offended" by this "reminder," and despite Greene's acknowledgement that "[m]erely in naming the poetess, a critic steps off into uncharted territory" (63–64). Her defensiveness was well warranted. In 1972, "poetess" had long been the identity marker of a fraught category facilitating canonical exclusion, as modernist critics purged nineteenth-century women poets from a masculinist Anglo-American literary tradition. A politely patronizing put-down, the label "poetess" conjured up a figure embodying feminized sentiment, emotional effusiveness, and performative display, associated with a derivative repertoire of poetic forms (sentimental, Sapphic, or elegiac lyric modes chiefly) and motifs (romantic betrayal, mourning mothers, pious religiosity, and metaphors of hearts, flowers, weeping, and warbling birds). By the millennium, the recovery of women writers across the fields of Romantic, Victorian, and American studies had generated a more historicized understanding of a transatlantic "Poetess" tradition. In 1999, Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, characterizing "the 'Poetess'" as "a category … now being revived" (521), reframed the generic lyrical subjectivity associated with poetess sentiment. Other scholars investigated an unsettling figure integral to expanding print culture who destabilized the boundaries between private and public, print and performance media, gendered separate spheres, and patriotism and cosmopolitanism. In Susan Brown's words in 2006, critics viewed the poetess as a "marker of the vexed relationship between highly naturalized constructions of femininity, new modes of production, and changing patterns of cultural consumption" (199–200). Increasingly capitalized in this amassing scholarship, "Poetess" acquired a complex and often positive valence, even when the term's gender-policing functions were acknowledged.1 Nevertheless, approaches to the poetess remained vigorously contested within modern feminist criticism, much as the word itself was an increasingly "vexed term" in the late nineteenth century (Conley 379). Hence the conflict between recurring metaphors of exhuming or (re)burying the poetess (continuing in this forum). In 1997, Anne Mellor objected that focus on the poetess did not accommodate genealogies of Romantic women's poetry other than the tradition exemplified by L.E.L. and Felicia Hemans.2 In 2007, noting its "stunning comeback" after "a century or more in history's dustbin," Paula Bennett similarly criticized "the resuscitation of the Poetess soubriquet" as a category obscuring the "plenitude" of nineteenth-century American women's poetry (267, 265). Numerous scholars have likewise underscored the role of alternative traditions for Victorian women writers: [End Page 147] for instance, ballads for the working-class women poets investigated by Florence Boos, or the minstrel tradition that Isobel Armstrong considers in relation to Landon in this forum. When Victorianists do examine the poetess figure, it is often to stress resistance to it by individual writers. Thus, Margaret Linley demonstrates how Christina Rossetti's work "complicate[s] our understanding of the poetess as cultural category" (286), Kathryn Ledbetter analyzes Violent Fane's manipulation of "dominant constructions of the poetess" (143), and Beverly Taylor emphasizes Elizabeth Barrett Browning's determination "not to be a poetess" in a 2019 article (149–50) and this forum. Alternatively, others have reinforced the resurgence of the poetess figure, although in increasingly capacious and diverse forms, as in Charles Laporte's approach to George Eliot as poetess-prophet or Alison Chapman's Networking the Nation (2015) treating the protagonist of Aurora Leigh as a poetess who is also a transnational citizen-ess of the world. Most concertedly, Tricia Lootens's The Political Poetess (2017) vigorously argues for pursuing "Poetess studies" from "new standpoints" by examining the "racialized national and imperial functions of a poetics of separate spheres" embodied in "Poetess performance" (11). "'Poetess' Debates" arises out of the overflowing response to a CFP circulated in 2020 for the NAVSA conference "Unsettling Victorians."3 The call was motivated first of all by my own unresolved conflicts. I was deeply ambivalent about a taxonomy that seemed to insist more on gendered (and class, race, and genre) segregations than did the Victorians themselves.4 In Lootens's terms, I wanted to close the book on "Poetess studies" (6). At the same time, I...

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