The study of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry is undergoing a renaissance. Aside from Emily Dickinson, nineteenth-century female poets were largely forgotten until the archival investigations of the 1970s, when they were rediscovered and examined by several critics.1 Despite the already extensive effort to reprint women’s poems, write their critical biographies, pioneer new and more useful anthologies, and compile lengthy and inclusive encyclopedias, scholars have only begun to examine critical approaches to women’s poems and the assumptions they bring to bear on reading and teaching women’s writing. What do these anthologies tell us about nineteenth-century American women’s writing? How should we judge their poetry?
In “Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets Revisited” (1998), Cheryl Walker contends that women’s writing contains more stylistic variety and vocal complexity than previously ascribed. In The Nightingale’s Burden (1982), she identifies several persistent types of poems: the “sanctuary” poem, in which the protagonist finds freedom in a shelter; the power fantasy; the “free bird” poem, in which the speaker identifies with a bird in flight and symbolically imagines freeing herself; and the marriage poem. Although her essay still identifies generic features in women’s poems, Walker advocates dividing women’s poetry into four temporal and stylistic categories: early national, romantic, realist, and modern. Early national poets, like Lydia Sigourney, appeal to piety and reason, praise decorum, and base their belief in human dignity on democracy. Romantics, like Frances Osgood, writing in the early to mid-nineteenth century and including transcendentalists, explore extreme psychological states and emotions rather than the effects of injustice on the individual. Slavery and Indian rights are abstractions. Realists, like Alice and Phoebe Cary, on the other hand, are poets who “take up the political challenges of the romantics but devote themselves to portraying the conditions of everyday life” (Walker, “American Women Poets Revisited,” 232). Finally, moderns resist sentimentalism, refuse to come to tidy conclusions about moral dilemmas, use fractured language, and challenge any belief system that dictates a single view of the world. Both Helen Hunt Jackson and Lizette Woodworth Reese employ language that is free of archaisms, highly imagistic, and portrays a subjective view of life.
Walker’s categories provide a useful way to explore the variety and complexity of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. Walker admits that women’s poems are hybrids, often combining more than one style and literary movement. Thus, reading nineteenth-century women’s poems presents the difficulty – and the pleasure – of reading them outside of traditional categories. Sentimentalism – the expression of unwarranted emotion in decorative, florid language – presents an obstacle for modern readers, who are more comfortable with spare language and checked feelings. Sentimentalism, according to M. H. Abrams, applies to “an excess of emotion to an occasion, or, in a more limited sense, to an overindulgence in the ‘tender’ emotions of pathos and sympathy” (Glossary of Literary Terms, 156). Since Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms was published, critics have redefined the term to include a range of emotional responses once de fined as “excessive” and now viewed as a style, strategy, or other device. Although reading their poetry may go beyond our taste, the expression of emotion in many women’s poems may lead us to reconsider the portrayal of them as “angels in the house,” and, simultaneously, to reconsider our definition of sentimentalism. No saccharine expression of emotion, nineteenth-century women’s lyrics portray lust, greed, and anger openly. Although they cultivated a public persona and were widely known for poems that appealed to the masses, many female poets also wrote lyrics that expressed emotions barely considered printable in their eras. Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–68) and Emma Lazarus (1849–87), whose “The New Colossus” was inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, for example, both stake out new emotional territory by using strong female characters, invoking Old Testament locales, and expressing their emotions in florid language. Known widely for her popular “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) in her book Passion Flowers (1854) challenged the prevailing image of women’s private lives, even though she felt that home life was sacred and that women should build upon that foundation rather than disturb the basic institution of society. A lesser-known poet, Rose Terry Cooke (1827–92) portrays in “Blue-Beard’s Closet” and “Semele” the threat of seduction and rape. Not accepting the conventional formula of piety and overblown grief, these poets use excessive emotion in part to signal their willingness to go beyond the constraints of their era. Finally, their commitment to causes of social injustice reveals their similarity to male writers and leads us increasingly to question a false division between the sexes.
Writing in an era of political, religious, and artistic ferment, nineteenth-century American women writers were vitally engaged in bringing about social and political change. Despite their domestic themes, writers were committed to abolition, Indian rights, pacifism, temperance, suffrage, education, and the environment, to name a few.2 Recently, new revisions by social historians and literary critics have sought to qualify the doctrine of “separate spheres” – the belief that men’s and women’s realms of action belonged to work and the home respectively and were mutually exclusive. They demonstrate that the boundaries between these “spheres” were more fluid than previously gathered. Despite their often troubled personal lives, female poets hinted at no discord, using Mary Kelley’s terms, between their “private” selves and “public stages.”3 Furthermore, male and female poets appear to have interacted more than once thought. In Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (1990), Susan Coultrap-McQuin argues that the so-called “Gentleman Publishers” – men like Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who performed personal favors, advanced money, and edited women’s literary works – encouraged trust and loyalty among their female authors. This aura of gentlemanly courtesy, as well as the popularity of literary salons, like those of Alice and Phoebe Cary in New York City and Annie Fields in Boston, allowed writers to interact and learn from each other. Male and female writers shared their literary milieu and their works resemble one another in style and content.
Nineteenth-century American women’s poetry has been derided by the aesthetic values of its own and a later age; today it is challenging the norms by which we judge literary texts. Between 1820 and 1885, editors often characterized women’s verse as affective, “natural,” and spontaneous and portray women as unconscious wellsprings of emotion. The aesthetic criteria employed by nineteenth-century editors who judged women’s “effusions” – insisting that they speak about pious and domestic topics in a smooth-flowing, untroubled meter – also prompted late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century critics’ vehemence against sentimental verse. Like Mark Twain’s sentimental versifier, Emmeline Grangerford, the poetess became humorists’ stock-in-trade. Except for Dickinson’s crucial example, nineteenth-century American women’s poetry was thought until only recently to be more conservative and less varied stylistically than the fiction, and to be intellectually dull. A sensitive reader, Louise Bogan in her Achievement in American Poetry (1951) delineated an “authentic current” of emotion and technical simplicity in the poems of Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856–1935), Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920), and Dickinson, yet she rejected sentimental poetry as a caricature against which early twentieth-century writers needed to define themselves. Male poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935), according to Bogan, “twist[ed] the clichés of sentimental poetry to a wry originality” and heralded a new era in American poetry, revealing a heightened realism, laconic speech, and dry humor (21). On the other hand, women poets, whose methods “proved to be as strong as they seemed to be delicate,” were responsible for the important task of “revivifying warmth of feeling” (22–23). Bogan dates the beginning of this new era of genuine feeling and technical simplicity from the publication of Wilcox’s Poems of Passion in 1886 and Reese’s A Branch of May in 1887. Despite their achievement, however, she deems the high emotionalism and formulaic techniques of women’s verse responsible for the drop in quality of Victorian poetry. Although in many ways she belittles women’s verse by inscribing it within a sentimental frame, Bogan also pays tribute to the first appearance of genuinely realistic and adventurous poets who were Dickinson’s contemporaries: “It is all the more remarkable, in view of this redoubtable and often completely ridiculous record of sentimental feminine attitudinizing in verse, that true, compelling, and sincere women’s talents were able to emerge. Sentimental poetry on the middle level was never destroyed – it operates in full and unimpeded force at the present day; but an authentic current began to run beside it” (24).
The women poets Bogan singles out for praise might aptly be termed “proto early-modernist,” as Paula Bennett argues, for they bridge the heightened sentimentalism of mid-nineteenth-century America and the imagism, particularity, and aesthetic restraint of the modernists. In contrast, modernist writers divorced themselves from the exaggerated emotion and simple narratives about domestic life of the Victorian era and advocated instead restrained feeling and a highly imagistic style. The imagist poem finds its roots in late nineteenth-century women’s nature poems, which often reflect “a movement . . . toward greater concrete detail, more ambiguous and flexible stylistic expression, and toward a much wider – and more disturbing – range of themes and voices than high-sentimentalism, with its commitment to religiously based domestic and cultural values, allowed.”4
Unlike Bogan, who dismissed sentimental writing as the unwarranted expression of emotion, many critics are seeking to recuperate sentimental literature. It relies on a deeply entrenched set of communal values and the conventions of religion and family life. Engaging the reader in a heightened display of feeling, sentimental texts “work” when they succeed in moving the reader. In Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985), Jane Tompkins contends that, unlike modernist writers who value unique language, sentimental novelists use commonplace language to appeal to the reader’s emotions. Rather than extol the works of Stowe and other female writers over those of their male contemporaries on aesthetic grounds, she contends that the neglected tradition of women’s literature should be judged according to its political or moral objectives. In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (1992), Shirley Samuels similarly argues that sentimentalism engages readers in a complex network of emotional issues. Not purely aesthetic in nature, sentimental literature for Samuels is permeated with political meanings that range across race, class, and gender lines.
Sentimental writers might be read to excavate political and social values of the period, but their works also yield pleasure based in rhetorical and linguistic complexity and stylistic eloquence, certainly objectives as important as their political motivation. Doing “cultural work,” as Tompkins puts it, in a way that is not reductive or crassly materialistic means we must account for the rhetorical power and artistic achievement of texts. In one of the first essays to address how we might more profitably read sentimental poetry, Joanne Dobson stresses the shared values and generic features by which sentimental literature succeeds or fails on its own terms. In “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” she writes: “Literary sentimentalism . . . is premised on an emotional and philosophical ethos that celebrates human connection, both personal and communal, and acknowledges the shared devastation of affectional loss” (Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” 266). Their clichés – the “crystal drop” for a tear or “curtaining lids” for closing eyes – are euphemisms for grief and death, and the degree to which they can convey real emotion using such trite expressions demonstrates their consummate artistry. Innovative writers, through the brilliant use of conventional language, can secure for sentimental literature a place in the literary canon: “As a body of literary texts, sentimental writing can be seen in a significant number of instances to process a conventional sentimental aesthetics through individual imagination, idiosyncratic personal feeling, and skilled use of language, creating engaging, even compelling fictions and lyrics – as, for example, in works by Alice Cary, Harriet Jacobs, Frances Sargent Osgood, Lydia Sigourney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to name a few” (265).
In “Teaching Nineteenth-Century Women Writers,” Paul Lauter challenges the formal and conceptual standards we apply to canonical literary works and explains the traditional devaluation of nineteenth-century women’s literature.
If we accept the definitions of literary excellence constructed in significant measure from the canonical works and used to perpetuate their status, we will inevitably place most of the fiction by nineteenth-century white women and black writers at a discount, and view them as at best elegaic local colorists, at worst, domestic sentimentalists. Indeed, we will not see what these writers are attempting to accomplish, much less how well or poorly they do what Jane Tompkins calls their “cultural work.”
(Lauter, “Teaching,” 128)
For Lauter, accepting the definition that a classic transcends its time prevents us from appreciating the qualities that make nineteenth-century women’s writing distinctive. Texts are historical agents that encode and transmit ideas pervading their culture. If we accept only the standards of self-containment, metaphysical ambiguity, and irony extolled by the New Critics, we will appreciate neither the authors’ stated or implicit intentions nor their relative success or failure, much less their ability to affect social change.
Although Dobson, Tompkins, and Lauter argue that sentimentalism requires we shift our standards to appreciate the criteria by which these works were originally judged, I would argue that a comparison of men’s and women’s verse deepens our understanding of their poetic achievement. Like their male counterparts, female poets adhere to family values, elevate the roles of mothers, grieve over the deaths of children, press for abolition, and so on. Male poets, such as Longfellow, Whittier, Freneau, and Emerson, also inscribe sentimental moments or at least reflect beliefs in family and religion that female poets share. Both men and women use stylistically similar features in their poems. They differ, however, in the density of detail with which they represent domestic matters (Walker, “American Women Poets Revisited,” 234). Women, whose lives revolved around the home and family life, rendered the day-to-day behaviors of their children in more detail than men. Sentimentalism’s appeal to shared values becomes a means for understanding and ultimately changing the world.
A writer of the early national period, Lydia Huntley Sigourney exemplifies in her writing the sentimental appeals that pervade early nineteenth-century protest literature. Sigourney embodies the conflict typical for women writers in this period: her life conforms in every respect to the social standards of her age, except that she writes professionally. Her lyrics, too, reflect the dilemma of most women’s work: on the one hand, she elevates a mother’s union with her infant as a means to connect with women from every nation and race and, as a sentimentalist, to evoke sympathy. On the other hand, she addresses issues of Indian rights, environmentalism, the effect of westward expansion on the landscape, women’s maltreatment, abolition, education, and pacifism. According to Bennett, “she can be written off as the archetypal nineteenth-century poetess, a writer whose obsession with death, especially child death, makes her the foremother of an entire century of Emmeline Grangerfords. Conversely, she can be viewed . . . as a basically political writer, whose particular concerns – Indians, women, the environment, peace, etc. – make her a highly sympathetic figure for audiences today” (Bennett, Anthology, 3–4). In fact, such views are not mutually exclusive. As a popular nineteenth-century writer, Sigourney employed all the sentimental poetic conventions of her day. What is remarkable is the extent to which, within the dominant rhetoric, she was able to challenge political injustices.
According to Walker, Annie Finch’s watershed article, “The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney’s Nature Poetry,” contends that Sigourney “defied the conventions of romantic poetry, which were premised on a male view of subjectivity and individualism, substituting instead a female ‘sentimental’ ethic based on shared communal values” (Walker, “American Women Poets Revisited,” 233). Rather than present a model of subjectivity standing apart from the world, the female poet, according to Finch, lacks a privileged central self and relies instead on shared values, such as family love and religion, to bond with others. If, as Finch posits, female poets give nature equal rank as an independent entity, then Sigourney portrays nature as standing above human concerns, testifying to the injustices perpetrated upon oppressed peoples.
One can usefully compare Sigourney’s elegy for the dispersed Indian peoples whose names have been preserved on the landscape with that of another writer who also eulogizes their passing – Philip Freneau. Philip Freneau’s “The Indian Burying Ground” memorializes the traces of the Indian landscape and describes a fantasy of the Indians who have passed away but still haunt their land:
In spite of all the learned have said,I still my old opinion keep;The posture, that we give the dead,Points out the soul’s eternal sleep.
Not so the ancients of these lands –The Indian, when from life released,Again is seated with his friends,And shares the joyous feast.
His imaged birds, and painted bowl,And venison, for a journey dressed,Bespeak the nature of the soul,ACTIVITY, that knows no rest.
His bow, for action ready bent,And arrows, with a head of stone,Can only mean that life is spent,And not the old ideas gone.
Here still a lofty rock remains,On which the curious eye may trace(Now wasted, half, by wearing rains)The fancies of a ruder race.(lines 1–24)
Although the Indians have died, they are still present to the speaker’s mind; despite the passage of time, the natural features of the landscape – “the swelling turf,” “a lofty rock,” “an aged elm” – all signal the continuation of the Indians in the observer’s mind. Freneau compares the forest to a sylvan utopia, replete with a “shepherd” who observes the scene and an “Indian queen” named “Shebah,” evoking the Old Testament kingdom. If, as Walker contends, sentimentalism occurs when feeling predominates over reason, then Freneau’s closing stanza celebrates the power of the “fancy” over “reason” and, by extension, of “fancy” over the poetic imagination: “And long shall timorous fancy see / The painted chief, and pointed spear, / And Reason’s self shall bow the knee / To shadows and delusions here” (37–40). However, in relegating the Indians to “shadows” and “delusions,” Freneau avoids the political imperative to protest the Indians’ disappearance. As Susan Gilmore has argued, “Freneau’s poem serves as a eulogy – one which elides the Indian’s on-going presence as well as poetry’s political impact. ‘Reason’ can afford a cursory ‘bow’ to sentiment in a poem which buries even as it resurrects its subject” (Gilmore, “‘Ye May Not Wash It Out,’” 6).
In “Indian Names,” Sigourney points out the persistence of vanished Indian nations in the nation’s cultural memory through their place names. Like many women’s poems, Sigourney’s lyrics can be usefully compared to those of men who address the same concerns. Sigourney’s “Indian Names” openly protests the excision of Indians, rather than naturalizing their passing into the landscape:
Ye say they all have passed away,That noble race and brave,That their light canoes have vanishedFrom off the crested wave;That ’mid the forests where they roamedThere rings no hunter shout,But their names is on your waters,Ye may not wash it out.(lines 1–8)
Sigourney objects to the forgetfulness of the white settlers who ignore Indian names, and accuses the nation of breaking its pact with the Indians. The most impressive metaphor of the poem is water, symbolizing both Christian succession and the white settlers’ desire to cleanse the Indian from the land. The Indian’s name “is on your waters,” and “Ye may not wash it out” (6–7). Indeed, the names of the “everlasting rivers” eloquently express in a “dialect of yore” a reminder of this truth. Yet the paradox of the poem lies in the futile desire on the part of the white settlers to Christianize and erase any traces of the Native peoples from the land. Sigourney’s choice of a domestic metaphor to protest against the erasure of the Indians from our history suggests just how closely she believed disenfranchised women could be aligned with, and speak for, the dispossessed Indians. According to Gilmore, “as the essence of baptism and the conduit for exploration and commerce, water becomes the medium of colonial annihilation and forgetfulness” (“‘Ye May Not Wash It Out,’”7). European explorers to America have inscribed the Indians and their tragic history onto the landscape permanently by keeping the original Native names for our lakes, streams, and mountains.
Unlike Sigourney, who finds in Christian succession and democracy ample reason to protest the attempted erasure of the Indians from the landscape, romantic poets base their objection to injustice on philosophical grounds. Cheryl Walker notes that “the American romantics . . . revel in their emotions and explore extreme psychological states; they defy conventions, even praising sexual excess, and their work is notable for its lack of balance and its dark implications about the human psyche” (Walker, “American Women Poets Revisited,”232). Whereas early national poets celebrate democratic ideals and elevate the individual based on equality, romantics redress attacks on individual liberties in more abstract terms. Margaret Fuller, writing her poem “Governor Everett Receiving the Indian Chiefs” in 1837, attacks not so much the Jacksonian policy of forced Indian removal but the overblown, sentimental treatment of the Indians in novels and poems: “American romance is somewhat stale. / Talk of the hatchet, and the faces pale, / Wampum and calumets, and forests dreary, / Once so attractive, now begins to weary” (8–11). Fuller turns to nature for inspiration throughout the poem and to revivify the dead language of poetry. Yet she praises the power of Everett’s speech when she notes that it moves even the most stoic to shed “some natural tears” (101). The closing stanza ambiguously endorses a vote in favor of the power of words to move the viewer: “’Twas a fair scene – and acted well by all; / So here’s a health to Indian braves so tall – / Our Governor and Boston people all!” (152–4). Given Fuller’s initial critique of sentimental language and her evocation of the same description, she may well have meant to parody the rhetoric of sentimental novelists, like James Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Sedgwick: “But every poetaster scribbling witling, / From the majestic oak his stylus whittling, / Has helped to tire us, and to make us fear / The monotone in which so much we hear / Of ‘stoics of the wood,’ and ‘men without a tear’” (14–18). The power of speech to move the listener to moral actions is perfectly in keeping with the power of sentiment to change the nation.
Among the poets of the romantic era, Frances Sargent Osgood flaunts convention and explores men’s and women’s emotions in the social world. Osgood deals with social life and courtship in her witty, urbane poems of the 1840s and 1850s. Certainly, a number of romantic writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Rose Terry Cooke, Margaret Fuller, and Emily Dickinson, long for a realm of plenitude that may never have existed or is irretrievably lost. As a romantic, Osgood elevated love as an unattainable ideal, while she wittily portrayed the actual dealings between men and women. As Joanne Dobson has argued, Osgood’s manuscript poems reveal an irreverence that was perhaps too challenging for her to consider publishing them. As a sentimentalist, moreover, she extols fancy or imagination over reason. “A Flight of Fancy,” for example, portrays a case between two litigants, Fancy, portrayed as a colorful, light-hearted bird, and dour old Reason. They appear before the bar of Judge Conscience. Despite the judgment in Reason’s favor, Fancy appeals to everyone, and, ultimately, she lulls reason to sleep and escapes through the “hole in the lock” of the cell door. Walker describes this poem as a “power fantasy” in which the female speaker seeks to exert control by escaping from the patriarchal order: “She claims the right to her freedom but in doing so she subverts the reigning order” (Walker, Nightingale’s Burden, 39–40). If Fancy is associated with women’s freedom and sexuality, then women can escape the domination of Reason only through “the very image of their sexuality” (Walker, Nightingale’s Burden, 40).
Written perhaps as a response to Poe, “The Lily’s Delusion” epitomizes Osgood’s witty, rebellious revision of sentimental language:
A cold, calm star look’d out of heaven,And smiled upon a tranquil lake,Where, pure as angel’s dream at even,A Lily lay but half awake.
The flower felt that fatal smileAnd lowlier bow’d her conscious head;“Why does he gaze on me the while?”The light, deluded Lily said.
Poor dreaming flower! – too soon beguiled,She cast nor thought nor look elsewhere,Else she had known the star but smiledTo see himself reflected there.
Close in form and sentiment to Poe’s “Evening Star,” Osgood may have meant to comment sarcastically on her perceived betrayal. His poem “Evening Star,” written in 1827, might have been the basis for Osgood’s “The Lily’s Delusion.” Poe recounts a romantic disillusionment. In the middle world, between day and night, the speaker observes the “cold moon” (5), surrounded by her “slaves” (6), the planets, but notes that she exhibits only “her cold smile” (10). Disappointed by her lack of feeling, the speaker turns to the evening star and extols her pride twice as well as the distance from earth that makes the star appear more attractive to the speaker. Osgood’s poem creates a dreamy netherworld ruled by moonlight and its deceptions rather than by the light of day, symbolizing full consciousness. The Lily’s semiconsciousness hints that, not yet fully initiated into the deceptions of love, she must undergo a romantic betrayal. Innocent and flattered by the apparent constancy of the “cold, calm star,” the Lily does not see its vanity until too late. Aptly titled, “The Lily’s Delusion” turns the tables on writers who portray women as vain creatures and chastises women for not realizing the true object of men’s attachment.
Whereas romantics elevate the emotions and human psyche, realists accurately depict the conditions under which people live. As Cheryl Walker notes, “realists take up the political challenges of the romantics but devote themselves to portraying the conditions of everyday life. Alice Cary and Lucy Larcom might be classified as realists insofar as they make available the detailed struggles of common people of the working class” (“American Women Poets Revisited,” 232). Donald Pizer notes that one hallmark of nineteenth-century realism is verisimilitude of detail derived from observation and documentation, as in the case of photography and journalism. Such writing “is an effort to approach the norm of experience – that is, a reliance upon the representative rather than the exceptional in plot, setting, and character” (Pizer, Realism and Naturalism, 1–2). According to M. H. Abrams, whereas romantic literature often presents “life as we would have it be, more picturesque, more adventurous, more heroic than actual,” realism presents “an accurate imitation of life as it is” (Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms, 140). Far from elevating the lives of its characters, as does romance, realistic writing portrays the average, commonplace person who has ordinary experiences. Although the characters’ lives may be ordinary, they may display, under special circumstances, heroism. Cary and Larcom rose from the lower and middle classes and devoted themselves in their work to depicting the lives they knew. Both writers were influenced by another poet who idealized the plight of the working classes: John Greenleaf Whittier. In fact, Whittier attended the Carys’ salons in New York City, and Phoebe so idealized his talent that she extolled him in one poem as “Great master of the poet’s art!” In a letter to John Greenleaf Whittier about her book, which she had just sent him, Cary notes “it is made of what I myself have seen and felt and known – I have tried to depict the scenes I am familiar with, and have not tried to pen what was foreign to my experience” (MS BMS AM 1844 [69]; Sept. 28, 1866). Although she notes that she wishes to discuss spiritualism and other topics with him, her writing is drawn from the actual circumstances of her life. Not only were Whittier’s poems thought worthy of emulation, they also reflected political views shared by other liberal northern intellectuals; as an abolitionist, a Quaker, and a defender of the working class, Whittier wrote poems that elevated the life of the average laborer. As Walker notes, it would be very difficult to tell Whittier’s poems from Alice Cary’s or Lucy Larcom’s, both of whom wrote poems sympathetic to the lives of working-class women. Not only do Whittier’s poems concern the virtues of heroism (as in “Barbara Frietchie”), they also portray stalwart New Englanders who enforce a strict code of ethics on others, as in “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” in which the women of the town of Marblehead tar and feather the captain for sailing away from his sinking ship and leaving the townspeople to drown.
Another writer who portrays middle-class life, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, depicts the heroic stoicism of the lower classes in the poem “The Village Blacksmith.” Unlike Cary, Longfellow celebrates the stoicism that allows the blacksmith to continue on in life, despite his many losses. Given the blacksmith’s centrality in his village, he becomes an emblem of stoicism and the power of sentiment to transform human lives into something greater:
Week in, week out, from morn till night,You can hear his bellows blow;You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,With measured beat and slow,Like a sexton ringing the village bell,When the evening sun is low.And children coming home from schoolLook in at the open door;They love to see the flaming forge,And hear the bellows roar,And catch the burning sparks that flyLike chaff from a threshing-floor.(lines 13–24)
Extolling the blacksmith’s simple life and remarking the regular sound of his hammer, which marks time for the village like a sexton ringing “the village bell,” Longfellow naturalizes the blacksmith’s description and hearkens to the season of change and death: the boys gather round the smithy in the afternoon to see the sparks that fly from the anvil like “chaff from a threshing floor.” Free of debt, the blacksmith embodies a natural dignity and meets the world head on: “And looks the whole world in the face, / For he owes not any man” (11–12). Furthermore, in the face of seasonal change, Longfellow portrays the way women can connect the blacksmith with emotion: listening to his daughter’s voice makes his heart “rejoice” (30–6), and imagining it resembles his deceased wife’s voice brings him to tears.
Read against the heroic stoicism and pervasive sentimentalism in the depiction of lower-class life in Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith,” Cary’s “The Washerwoman” portrays the tragedy of a woman’s plight by sentimentally placing her disappointment in the context of her failed social ambitions, which were typically fulfilled for women through marriage. Instead, Cary’s poem indicts classicism by portraying the way the villagers misjudge Rachel’s life based on her appearance. Cary alludes to the story of disappointed love between Rachel and “old crazy” Peter. Although the speaker nostalgically recalls Rachel’s place in the village, she conveys the ennui her actions create in those around her. The children count the shirts to be cleaned as they pass by and find it “weary work / Only to hear her rub” (19–20). The blacksmith, too, jokes that he wishes he had her never-tiring hands and her back as an anvil. Finally, the housewives, who might be thought to understand, only ask Rachel “with a conscience clear and light” (33–4) to come at night to wash. The last stanza holds out the possibility that Rachel and Peter’s love might be consummated in heaven: “Her heart had worn her body to / A handful of poor dust, – / Her soul was gone to be arrayed / In marriage-robes, I trust” (65–8). The last line comments on their possible marriage in heaven, yet its ambiguous tone suggests that the outcome may differ from her expectations. Despite her hard life, Rachel is worn down by her “heart.”
Fully immersed in the language of sentimentalism, women writers adopted what Alicia Ostriker has called the “voice of duplicity” to acquire more freedom in print than otherwise might have been imagined possible. We might classify the voices of Cary’s poems as mimetic: As Mary Jacobus explains, a mimetic voice imitates women who, unable to write outside the patriarchal tradition, must adopt its vocabulary and stylistic techniques in order to undo it (“Question of Language,” 210). In “The Bridal Veil,” Cary depicts a woman who differentiates between the socially sanctioned view of marriage and her personal viewpoint: marriage does not imply possession of her soul and emotion. Rather than support the bodily and legal possession of women in marriage, the speaker challenges the groom to “grow to new heights if I love you to-morrow” (12). The crux of the poem’s ambiguity lies in the image of the veil: symbolically dividing the past from the present, girlhood from married life, it simultaneously signals her role as wife and hides her real emotions. Beneath her veil, the bride has “wings,” which may be angelic or presage her desire for flight. “And spite of all clasping, and spite of all bands,” she warns, “I can slip like a shadow, a dream, from your hands” (16–17). “Bands,” of course, implies marriage banns or a wedding band as well as manacles. Building on the common idealization of women, the speaker reveals the choice that lies before the married couple: the veil serves as a remnant of “peace that is dead” or the sign of “bliss that can never be written or spoken” (23). The bride may conform publicly to the socially sanctioned role in marriage, but in private she responds to her husband’s caresses or chiding, leaving the veil to symbolize either the consummation of their union or its division.
Modernist writers appear toward the end of the century and diverge from the literature of protest. Bennett argues that a modern sensibility emerged in women’s nature poetry.
On the basis of the poems I have collected, I now believe that a direct line can be demonstrated between women poets writing in the late nineteenth century and the major women poets of early modernism. More than that, it can be shown that stylistic and thematic changes in women’s poetry between the late 1850s and 1890 – changes that, among other things, help account for the surprisingly positive reception Dickinson’s poetry enjoyed in 1890 on its first publication – are basic to the evolution of the early modernist poem.
(“Nature Poetry and the Imagist Poem,” 89–90)
Among the features she identifies is a movement away from archaic language and communal values and toward a personal, idiosyncratic viewpoint. The personal and idiosyncratic style includes a more ambiguous, complex, and less conventional point of view than that of sentimental poets, with their reliance on religious and home life. I would argue that the modernism in imagist poets, such as Amy Lowell and H. D., who stress imagery, aesthetic restraint, and an increasingly open poetic form, is already evident in poets from the 1870s and 1880s. Helen Hunt Jackson’s alienated subjectivity, linguistic complexity, and heightened sense of imagery set her apart from many of her precursors to become a hallmark of the modernists. Like several of her contemporaries, Jackson was a traditionalist who used the sonnet to express her innermost feelings in a detached way. Frequently, her speakers comment on the lives of women whose existences are portrayed through alien settings, such as polar seas, deserts, or tropic oceans.
In “Poppies in the Wheat,” the speaker displays astute awareness of nature that goes beyond a farmer’s materialism:
Along Ancona’s hills the shimmering heat,A tropic tide of air with ebb and flowBathes all the fields of wheat until they glowLike flashing seas of green, which toss and beatAround the vines. The poppies lithe and fleetSeem running, fiery torchmen, to and froTo mark the shore.
The farmer does not knowThat they are there. He walks with heavy feet,Counting the bread and wine by autumn’s gain,But I, – I smile to think that days remainPerhaps to me in which, though bread be sweetNo more, and red wine warm my blood in vain,I shall be glad remembering how the fleet,Lithe poppies ran like torchmen with the wheat.
Portraying the port city of Ancona, Jackson preserves the memory of the field and contrasts her awareness with the farmer’s dull, plodding nature. This poem compares the heat to “a tropic tide of air” and the fields to “flashing seas of green,” where the red poppies resemble “running, fiery torchmen” who mark the shore. Another poem, “Tidal Waves,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1881, recounts the tidal waves that “In cruel clutch the mightiest ships they take, / Tossing them high in fiendish jubilee; / Leaving them far inland, stranded hopelessly” (3–5). Awakening “strange fancies” in the speaker, she compares these tidal waves to “brave women’s souls” that are borne “To barren inlands, where, too strong to die, / Even of thirst and loneliness and scorn, / Like ghastly stranded wrecks, long years they lie!” (12–15). Whereas in “Tidal Waves” Jackson explicitly connects the women’s stalwart lives to their inward exile, “Poppies on the Wheat” omits any discussion of women’s lives. Unlike the farmer, who is caught up in the world of loss and gain, “counting the bread and wine,” the speaker’s memory when “bread be sweet / No more, and red wine warm my blood in vain” (12–13) will serve as consolation. Ultimately, the poem celebrates the power of imagination over actual life: the poet creates flowers for eternity through her beautiful imagery, whereas all the farmer can do is make dry bread. The allusion to Ancona, a busy port city, explains the farmer’s commercialism and confirms the speaker’s alienation – albeit silent – from the mercenary civilization of gain and loss.
Similarly, Lizette Woodworth Reese’s “August” uses imagery to depict a vivid contrast between blazing lilies and their parched surroundings. Reese’s poem marks her from her precursors: she does not append a moral. Instead, although she portrays the landscape in detail, the poem conveys a feeling of emptiness and absence: left on the scene, a rose bush with “not one / Rose left,” and a spider lying in wait for its prey. In contrast to the absence of movement and signs of life, she highlights the contrast between the dry land and the wild lilies, ablaze with color, lit like “saffron torches through the hush” (7). The impression of death overall is enhanced by the spider’s web, the “rank scents” on the air, and the stillness of the scene appears in the final image: “Upon the hill / Drifts the noon’s single cloud, white, glaring, still” (13–14). Emptying her poem of emotion, Reese accentuates the existence of nature apart from human concerns and uses imagery to create an atmosphere of silence and solitude in an amoral universe.
Emily Dickinson shares many of the characteristics of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, while at the same time she exceeds her contemporaries. Recently, the vein of criticism that sees Dickinson as a scribal publisher raises provocative issues about her absorption of the standards of verse as well as her process of composition. In Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith contend that Dickinson exchanged poems throughout her life with her sister-in-law, Susan, creating a poet’s workshop in which each writer edited and influenced the other. Far from atypical, however, Dickinson’s compositional process resembles the exchange of poems and letters among many women writers. The idea that verse should remain private was a convention that kept genteel women from publishing and, simultaneously, necessitated the development of a network of professional relationships among other women. While they held the most powerful roles in the publishing industry and established criteria for judging women’s verse, influential women, like Annie Adams Fields, acted as literary advisors, surrogate publishers, and salon holders to female authors like Louisa May Alcott, encouraging them to make the acquaintance of other writers. Dickinson uses several methods – circulating manuscripts among friends, visual effects, and the genre of the “letter-poem” – adapted by other women writers to build community among their literary counterparts and circumvent the rigors of publication. Given that many women writers needed to discover a means to distribute their writing, they mildly accepted the dictates of the publishing world while their subtle and ambiguous lyrics challenge the status quo.
Like the modernists, Dickinson resists the religious and philosophical systems that are hallmarks of the Victorian age. Like Jackson and Reese’s poems, Dickinson’s lyrics reveal the individualism, fractured syntax, and relativism that is more characteristic of the modernists than the Victorians. As Christopher Benfey notes about the poem beginning “Four Trees – upon a solitary Acre” (J 742), “The question of placement – the place of the four trees in the general nature, the place of human beings with regard to them – is for Dickinson, and for other American writers, a serious question. The poem is about giving place. ‘Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?’ Thoreau asked. Dickinson’s concern with objects – with how they are placed, and ‘give place’ to one another – seems to pose the same question” (Benfey, Emily Dickinson, 115). Dickinson’s canon is built around poems like this one that address the way objects in the world gain meaning depending on their placement with respect to other objects. The lyric beginning “Each Life Converges to some Centre –” (J 680) conveys the syntactical ambiguity and lack of a perceived philosophical or religious center:
Each Life Converges to some Centre –Expressed – or still –Exist in every Human NatureA Goal –
Embodied scarcely to itself – it may be –Too fairFor Credibility’s presumptionTo mar –
Adored with caution – as a Brittle Heaven –To reachWere hopeless, as the Rainbow’s RaimentTo touch –
Yet persevered toward – surer – for the Distance –How high –Unto the Saints’ slow diligence –The Sky –
Ungained – it may be – by a Life’s low Venture –But then –Eternity enable the endeavoringAgain.(J 680)
Although the design may be unperceived, Dickinson argues that there is still a “Centre” to which “Expressed – or still –” each human life “converges.” The indeterminacy of where or what that center might be and its inability to be articulated argue for the poet’s modern sensibility: rather than view the goal as attainable, its meaning is tantalizingly distant to the speaker, who compares it to a “Brittle Heaven.” Replacing the off rhymes of the first three stanzas with full rhymes, the poem implies that some conclusion may be attained with effort: like “the Saints’ slow diligence,” perseverance may allow those on earth to attain their goal. Paradoxically, although the goal may be unattained in one lifetime by a single “Life’s low Venture,” eternity ensures that the pursuit will continue again and again.
Jackson’s and Reese’s poems are typical of the modern poems by late nineteenth-century American women writers, who refine the language of sentimentalism and omit the didacticism and piety that so many writers cleaved to earlier in the century. Reese portrays the land in the absence of human beings, downplaying the religious and communal values important to the sentimentalists. Jackson, on the other hand, adheres in her poems to the activism and Christian values of mid-nineteenth-century writers, yet she underscores her detachment from the world of commercialism that Dickinson detested as well, elevating art above daily life and betraying the individual’s alienation that becomes standard in modern poetry. Reese and Jackson extend the achievement of women’s poetry beyond protesting injustice or redefining women’s roles to a self-conscious assertion of their poetic artistry. In doing so, they forecast the writings of modernists who are increasingly concerned with creating images that, as T. S. Eliot claimed, provide an “objective correlative” to specific emotions. More than any other poet, Dickinson uses indeterminacy and ambiguity to question the predominant mode of belief while maintaining A radically open poetic form. And Jackson, Reese, and Dickinson bring the lyric to the threshold of the twentieth century by using a conversational style, common language, and frequent enjambment, all features that are synonymous with a more contemporary sensibility.
Sentimentalism is only one of the strains of literary styles used in nineteenth-century America. Traditionalism, modernism, imagism, didacticism, symbolism – even as we refine our understanding of sentimentalism, we should take account of the extraordinary range and variety of styles of women’s poems. Only by acknowledging that men and women influenced one another’s poetry as well as demonstrating the particular ways that women’s poems differ can we begin to see the unique and important contribution nineteenth-century American female poets have made to our changing literary tradition.
1. In particular, the publication of Cheryl Walker’s The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900 (1983) broke ground for other works that sought to expand the American literary canon. In addition, Emily Stipes Watts’s The Poetry of American Women from 1632–1945 (1977) and Alicia Ostriker’s outstanding Stealing the Language (1989) have broadened the range of poets under discussion, and a number of once popular but long neglected poets, such as Lydia Sigourney, Frances Osgood, Alice Cary, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Lizette Woodworth Reese, are now discussed in college classrooms, critical articles, and popular scholarly debate. Within the past few years, anthologists have begun to revise the canon first selectively sketched by Cheryl Walker’s American Women Poets of the Nineteenth-Century: an Anthology (1992). Karen Kilcup’s Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: an Anthology (1997) organizes a variety of texts organized chronologically, thematically, and generically to expose the cross-cultural implications of women’s lives. Similarly, Janet Gray’s anthology, She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1997), reframes American literature as a comparative discipline comprising heterogeneous cultures. And Paula Bennett’s Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: an Anthology (1998) creates a taxonomy of writers who represent racial and regional differences. She divides the volume into “principal” and “secondary” poets of “regional, national, and special interest.”
2. Paula Bennett notes that Lydia Sigourney, a writer of books of etiquette, wrote poems that demonstrate a wide variety of political concerns. Bennett, Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets, 3.
3. The title of Mary Kelley’s book (see below) alludes to the split between women’s public and private personae in Nineteenth-century America.
4. See Paula Bennett, “Late Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Nature Poetry and the Evolution of the Imagist Poem,” Legacy: a Journal of American Women Writers 9 (1992): 92.