The term f. p. refers here to those aspects of f. crit. which are specifically concerned with poetry. Like poststructuralism and deconstruction (q.v.), f. crit. developed in the late 1960s. Before f. p., the critical treatment of women’s poetic creativity had been primarily misogynistic, emphasizing female incapacity for poetic invention (q.v.) or women’s inferiority in matters of experience, education, intellect, and imagination (q.v.). The “poetess,” whether bluestocking or sentimentalist, had frequently been the target of satire in masculine poetic texts. Since the romantic period, a number of women critics and writers, incl. Madame de Stael, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Virginia Woolf, have speculated on the contribution women might make to poetic trad. and commented on the difficulties of a poetic career for women. But only since the Women’s Liberation Movement have critics attempted a systematic critique of lit. hist. and theory from a f. perspective. F. p. brings to the study of poetry theories of sexual difference and of male cultural dominance which are grounded in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and cultural anthropology; a commitment to the political and cultural equality of women; and a belief in the importance of gender as a fundamental variable in the creation and interp. of lit. by both women and men. While it would be premature to claim that f. crit. has established a complete poetic theory, important work has been done on the study of women’s poetry, on the representation of women in poetry written by both sexes, and on the more general and central issues of gender and poetics.
According to the Eng. critic Jan Montefiore, “defining a f. p. means primarily understanding the significance of women’s poetry.” Other forms of crit. than f. have assumed that the poet will be a man and therefore have set out, as universal, concepts of poetic vocation, trad., and form that tacitly presume masculine norms. Women’s poetry has been neglected, denigrated, and misread because it has been judged by these inappropriate standards. No definitive hist. of women’s poetry has yet been written; nonetheless, through anthologies, editions, essays, specialized studies, and critical biographies, the outline of a female poetic hist, from Sappho to the present is well underway. Research has been carried out in every major national lit., but most thoroughly in Eng. and Am.
The comparative study of women’s poetry reveals many patterns of similarity in thought, themes, metaphors, and diction. It also reveals profound contradictions between the image of the poet as the “transcendent speaker of a unified culture” (Kaplan 70) and the image of Woman as silenced, dependent, and marginal. Recurring images of spinning, sewing, and writing, of the mother country or matria , and of the body, among others, have been cited by scholars. Yet the notion of a separate female poetic trad. is controversial, since women poets cannot isolate themselves from the influence of the dominant male literary trad, and therefore always write a double-voiced discourse. Women poets must also imitate or revise the tropes of the male trad. As the f. critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have noted, “female poets both participated in and diverged from the literary conventions and genres established for them by their male contemporaries” (Norton Anthol. of Lit. by Women [NALW] ). Furthermore, internal differences between women of nationality, class, and race preclude a single poetic matrilineage.
The history of women’s poetry in Eng. is marked by gaps and absences, and does not always fit the conventional periodization of poetic history, such as “the Ren.” or “romanticism.” We do not have any OE poetic texts by women, and few by women in the Middle Ages, although scholars argue that anonymous med. Frauenlieder , love-songs narrated by women, may have been the work of female poets. Even in the Ren., however, women had neither the humanist education in the classics, rhet., and logic deemed necessary for poetic careers, nor the financial independence and family support that would have enabled them to write poetry. Furthermore, the social climate was hostile to women’s poetic self-expression; women were enjoined to be silent, modest, obedient, and chaste. In the f. classic, A Room of One’s Own (1928), Virginia Woolf speculates that even if Shakespeare’s sister had been born with her brother’s genius in the Ren., she would have gone, mad or killed herself without writing a word.
Nevertheless, there were a small number of women poets in France and Eng. in the 16th c. Most extant texts are by learned ladies or aristocrats who attempt to reconcile the demands of womanly duty with poetic aspiration, as when Catherine Des Roches claims to be writing “with the spindles and the pen together in my hand” (“A ma quenoille” [16th c.]). Despite severe restrictions, Ren. women poets “did not simply accede to the silencing logic of their culture” but used forms of “negotiation and compromise” (Jones 79, 92) in which the active use of the female voice challenged and revised the linguistic, figurative, and thematic conventions of Neoplatonic and Petrarchan love-poetry.
The entrance of women into the literary professions began in the late 17th c. with the appearance of such poets as Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, and Anne Finch. In their verse, these women primarily asserted their right to speak and write, but they also expressed different attitudes towards the poetic role from that of men. Rather than the conventional address to fame or quest for poetic laurels that inspired male poets of the period, they denied ambition as a literary motive. Finch declares a fear of fame that may simply be expedient when she warns her Muse to “be cautious; / For groves of laurel thou we’ert never meant.” On the other hand, Behn’s frank eroticism and mockery of male pretensions, like Finch and Bradstreet’s explorations of female experience, introduce a new voice and subject-matter into poetry. Yet despite their efforts to conciliate male critics, this appearance of women poets on the literary scene was greeted by a spate of vituperative attacks on “Petticoat Authors,” attacks which continued with intensified virulence throughout the 18th c. Women writing within the strict rules of neoclassical poetics (q.v.), using the heroic couplet or the Augustan genres of the satire, the ode, or the epistle (qq.v.), had to confront a poetic establishment explicitly masculine in its ideology and aesthetics and often overtly misogynistic in its texts.
The 19th c. is now considered “the golden age of women’s lit.” (NALW ), although even by this point women make a much stronger showing in the new genre of the novel than in poetry. Margaret Homans has argued that women experienced a division between femininity and poetic subjectivity in the romantic period that hindered their success. The masculine romantic poetic self makes the feminine the Other which it must master and transcend, identified either as Nature, a women character, or the desired object of a quest. The image of Mother Nature was not helpful as inspiration or muse (qq.v.) for aspiring women poets, who needed to separate themselves from natural, maternal, and muse roles in order to write.
Women began to publish poetry in much greater numbers by the mid 19th c., but while the male pseudonym was widespread among women novelists in Europe and England from the 1840s on, women poets did not write under men’s names. Postromantic and Victorian crit. allotted a place for the woman poet in the lyric, which was considered a feminine form—private, emotional, and brief. In retrospect, even male romantic lyric poets, esp. Shelley and Keats, could be criticized as effeminate, a charge often levelled at Tennyson as well. But the feminization of poetry was not empowering to Victorian women poets. The “poetess” was stereotyped as an artless, genteel, and sentimental songbird, while long philosophical or political poems—as well as the position of Poet Laureate—were reserved for important and serious men. Nonetheless, recent work in f. p. has begun to demonstrate the range, originality, and power of such 19th-c. poets as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson.
By the beginning of the 20th c., the feminine lyric poet became the antagonist of a new school of male modernists. In their eyes, poetry “had become a mawkish, womanly affair full of gush and fine feelings. Lang. had gone soft and lost its virility; it needed to be stiffened up again, made hard and stone-like, reconnected to the physical world” (Eagleton). Modernist aesthetics called for impersonality, intellectuality, abstraction, and emotional distance, “opposed to the aesthetic of soft, effusive, personal verse supposedly written by women and romantics” (Madwoman 154). What Gertrude Stein called “patriarchal poetry” functioned as a system that silenced women and kept them out of the modernist canon. F. p. is now re-examining the relations between feminism and modernism, showing how the work of such poets as H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore makes use of matriarchal myths and experiments in lang., technique, and form in order “to excavate a specifically female past” (NALW 1241) and to create a new female trad.
In the late 20th c., women’s poetry has flourished in the critical climate created by f. p. Since the late 1960s, Am. women’s poetry has witnessed an explosion of creativity, the wealth of which praxis itself raises the issue of the relation between creativity and gender. Gilbert and Gubar have analyzed the metaphor of the pen as penis in Eng. lit., while other f. critics have traced the metaphor of creativity as childbirth. In The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Harold Bloom describes poetic creativity in Freudian terms as the son’s struggle for priority against the father or strong poetic precursor, while the poet’s Muse is figured as feminine, the mother-harlot who has “whored with many before him.”
How might poetic influence and the relationship to trad, be different if the poet is a woman? Do women have a Muse (q.v.)? One theory is that for postromantic women poets, the father-precursor and the Muse are the same powerful male figure, both enabling and inhibiting poetic creation. Another theory holds that the woman poet also has a female Muse, modeled on the mother-daughter. Women poets’ relation to female literary trad, may be less competitive and anxiety-ridden than men’s relation to their precursors, since women desire successful models of female creativity.
F. p. also raises questions about gender and genre, or the relationship between sexual identity and poetic form. According to Gilbert and Gubar, “verse genres have been even more thoroughly male than fictional ones” (Madwoman 68). Epic (q.v.) encodes masculine values of heroism and conquest; the pastoral elegy has functioned as “a vocational poem” signaling “admittance of a male novice to the sacred company of poets” (Schenk 13, 15). Women poets have revised and transformed such male genres as the sonnet, the lyric, and the elegy (qq.v.). Furthermore, while women have been missing from the pages of traditional lit. hist, as poets, they have figured prominently as subjects in men’s poems, represented as angels, whores, or monsters. As poets, they have revised these images as well as male myths describing such female figures as Eve, Medusa, Cassandra, Circe, Demeter and Persephone, Ariadne, Penelope, and Eurydice. Even meter or punctuation may be seen as connected to gender: Finch has described iambic pentameter as a “patriarchal meter” representing religion, public opinion, and status, while Dickinson’s hymn stanzas constitute a f. “anti-meter.” Other critics see the orthography of Dickinson’s poems as efforts to inscribe sexual difference through the use of dashes, both to refuse grammatical hierarchy and subordination and to introduce feminine ambiguities—gaps, wounds, stitches—into the poem.
Some Am. f. critics and poets have discussed the need to reinvent the “oppressor’s lang.” and to appropriate it for female experience. Adrienne Rich has described this as the quest for a “common lang.” or “mother tongue,” both an autonomous lang, of women across social, historical, and racial backgrounds and a vernacular feminine communication akin to Wordsworth’s famous definition of the poet as “man speaking to men.” But other f. critics ask how women can write in a lang, other than that of the patriarchal trad., and whether poetry can ever discard the figurative properties of lang, in order to represent experience. Within Fr. f. poststructuralist theory, different questions have been raised about the existence of a feminine poetic lang. Julia Kristeva has described a “revolution in poetic lang.” that brings a metaphoric “feminine” utterance into the text through rhythm, prosody, word-play, and nonsense. From this perspective, the “feminine” is not exclusive to women poets but represents a linguistic rupture in avant-garde writing such as the work of Mallarmé. F. p. may then analyze the subversive effects of such techniques.
Finally, f. p. investigates the significance of gender, masculinity, and sexuality in the work of male poets from Homer to the present, a vast project that has already begun to change the poetic canon as well as to revolutionize poetics
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