From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry 9780691231105

Citation preview

From School to Salon

From School to Salon reading nineteenth-century american women’s poetry

Mary Loeffelholz

p r i n c e to n u n i v e rs i t y p r e s s p r i n c e to n a n d ox f o r d

Copyright
2004 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Loeffelholz, Mary, 1958– From school to salon : reading nineteenth-century American women’s poetry / Mary Loeffelholz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-04939-4 (alk. paper) —ISBN 0-691-04940-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Women and literature—United States—History—19th century. 3. American poetry—19th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PS147.L46 2004 814.3099287–dc22 2003064126 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon. Printed on acid-free paper. ⬁ www.pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10

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To the memory of Barbara Jean Peiffer

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Objects of Recovery

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I. Prodigy and Teacher; or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex

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Chapter One Who Killed Lucretia Davidson?

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Chapter Two The School of Lydia Sigourney

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II. Lessons of the Sphinx: Poetry and Cultural Capital in Abolition and Reconstruction

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Chapter Three Poetry, Slavery, Personification: Maria Lowell’s “Africa”

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Chapter Four A Difference in the Vernacular: The Reconstruction Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

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III. The Conquest of Autonomy

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Chapter Five “Plied from Nought to Nought”: Helen Hunt Jackson and the Field of Emily Dickinson’s Refusals

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Chapter Six Metropolitan Pastoral: The Salon Poetry of Annie Fields

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Conclusion: The Sentiments of Recovery: Adrienne Rich and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Culture

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Many friends and colleagues in nineteenth-century American literature, poetry, and feminist studies have generously given of their intellectual inspiration and personal support during the writing of this book. Virginia Jackson, Yopie Prins, and Eliza Richards have helped me learn how to read nineteenth-century poetry of all kinds; their work is my abiding intellectual example, and their friendship a continuing pleasure. I am grateful to Shirley Samuels for exchanging work in progress, helping organize conference panels in warm places, surviving MLA meetings with me in cold places, and sharing the company of her children, John and Ruth—but most of all for her enduring friendship. Members of the Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Group, especially Elizabeth Young, Sandra Zagarell, and Susan Harris, have generously shared with me their wide knowledge of nineteenth-century American culture, as well as their professional and personal kindness. For sustaining conversations over the years about Emily Dickinson’s writings, I am grateful to my fellow board members in the Emily Dickinson International Society, especially Cristanne Miller, Suzanne Juhasz, and Martha Nell Smith; to Martha Nell and Marilee Lindemann I also owe my thanks for their friendship, support, willingness to listen—and for taking me to hear Bruce Springsteen. Adela Pinch offered the project timely encouragement in difficult moments, as did Elizabeth Barnes. I thank Lawrence Buell and Cassandra Jackson for responding to earlier versions of some of these arguments, and Karen Sanchez-Eppler ´ and Tricia Lootens for their comprehensively helpful and insightful readings of the manuscript for Princeton University Press. For hearing out earlier versions of some of the book’s arguments, I am grateful to Christopher Looby and the University of Pennsylvania English department; Priscilla Wald and the University of Washington English department; Philip Cavalier and the faculty of Catawba College; Peter Donaldson, Diana Henderson, Ruth Perry, and the Literature faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Lynn Wardley and the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University; Domhnall Mitchell and members of the Emily Dickinson International Society; and Meredith McGill and Rutgers University. My own colleagues, especially Guy Rotella, Stuart Peterfreund, Wayne Franklin, and other participants in the English department’s Barrs seminar series, have been constant and helpful interlocutors. I also thank Northeastern University and Vice Provost Ronald Hedlund for the award of a Re-

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search and Scholarship Development Fund grant that allowed me valuable time toward the book’s writing. For daily inspiration, I am grateful to Marina Leslie, who walked and talked out the beginnings of this book in our circuits around Jamaica Pond, who read with advice and encouragement, and who has been for the past ten years and more of our shared time in Northeastern’s English department my best example as a teacher, colleague, and friend. Laura Green has been the most demanding and at the same time the most generous reader that anyone completing a manuscript could ask for; her companionship in ideas has made this work not just possible but pleasurable. In the years it has taken to write this book, the love and strength of my family—my parents, Paul and Kay Loeffelholz; my brothers, Michael Loeffelholz, Mark Loeffelholz, and James Loeffelholz; and my sister, Anne Savage—have been tested and not found wanting. It is for all of them, but most especially for her daughter, Lauren, that this book is dedicated to the memory of my sister Barbara Jean Peiffer. Permission to reprint the following selections from Emily Dickinson’s writings is gratefully acknowledged: poems 401C, Dare you see a soul at the “White Heat”; 1373, The spider as an artist; 819B, The luxury to apprehend; and 513, The spider holds a silver ball, are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright
1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright
1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Letter 323, “To T. W. Higginson, Mid-July 1867,” reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright
1958, 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. For permission to publish and quote from the manuscripts of Annie Fields, I am grateful to the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Lines from poem V, from poem XII, and from poem XVIII of the “Twenty-one Love Poems,” from “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff,” and from “Power,” from The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977, by Adrienne Rich. Copyright
1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Lines from “For Memory,” “Heroines,” and “Culture and Anarchy,” from A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981, by Adrienne Rich. Copyright
1981 by Adrienne Rich, used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “Who Killed Lucretia Davidson? or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (1997): 271–93; I am grateful to the Yale Journal of Criticism and to the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Poetry, Slavery, Personification: Maria Lowell’s ‘Africa,’” Studies in Romanticism 38 (summer 1999): 171–202, and is reprinted here by courtesy of the Trustees of Boston University. Portions of chapter 6 appeared in “The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston’s Public Poetry and the Great Organ, circa 1863,” American Literary History 13 (summer 2001): 212–41, and are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. For permission to publish the images included in chapter 4, I thank the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Houghton Library.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

The Objects of Recovery The analyst who only knows about those authors from the past who have been recognized by literary history as worthy of being conserved is embracing an intrinsically vicious form of understanding and explanation. Such an analyst can only register, unwittingly, the way the ignored authors have affected, by the logic of action and reaction, the authors to be interpreted—the ones who, by their active rejection, have contributed to the others’ disappearance from history. This is to preclude a true understanding of everything in the work of the survivors themselves that is, like their rejections, the indirect product of the existence and action of the vanished authors. —PIERRE BOURDIEU, “The Conquest of Autonomy”

This book, like so many others in American literary scholarship of the past twenty-five years, is fundamentally a recovery project, aimed in the first place at delineating some part of “the existence and action,” in Bourdieu’s words, of a set of authors who had all but vanished from literary history for most of the past one hundred years: American women poets of the nineteenth century. Since the early 1990s, however, nineteenth-century American women poets have been well on their way to recovery. Nineteenth-century American poetry generally and especially poetry by American women have seen a minor publishing boom recently: John Hollander’s two-volume Library of America collection of nineteenth-century American poetry came out to much fanfare in 1993, preceded by Cheryl Walker’s 1992 anthology of nineteenth-century American women poets and Jane R. Sherman’s African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, and followed in 1997 by Janet Grey’s anthology She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century and, a year later, by Paula Bennett’s massive Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology.1 General pedagogical anthologies like the Heath and Norton anthologies of American literature soon began to follow suit by expanding their offerings in poetry, and other presses have followed the first wave of dedicated poetry anthologies with still other compilations.

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These anthologies clearly indicate a revival of professional interest in nineteenth-century American poetry beyond Dickinson and Whitman, but what is striking about this revival are the specific professional forms this interest has so far taken—and not taken. Popular nineteenth-century American poets, male and female, are today being copiously anthologized; but the relative dearth of scholarly essays and, even more, of full-length books on these poets suggests that criticism is only just beginning to confer scholarly significance on them.2 Furthermore, with some recent exceptions, very few general works in American literary and cultural studies have turned to poetry, especially nineteenth-century poetry beyond Whitman and Dickinson, in the course of explicating U.S. cultural histories of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other national thematics. The new American studies in this respect has so far differed surprisingly little from the old; as Joseph Harrington observed in 1996, American literary studies from the 1950s onward, for all the energies of canon expansion and new historicisms, has generally gone about its business as if “American poetry is not American literature.”3 What has made this now widely anthologized body of poetry so slow to develop a body of interpretive criticism, by contrast with the wealth of literary-critical and cultural work on “recovered” nineteenth-century American fiction? One answer is surely that recovery efforts in nineteenth-century American writing have tended to privilege social themes as a principle of selection and as their central critical means of understanding literature’s embeddedness in history. Lyric poetry’s traditional foregrounding of formal artifice and individual emotion over thematic social realism is unlikely, on these principles, to seem significant to read and teach as a genre, even if some individual poems can be enlisted within thematic categories already granted professional salience—as literature of the Civil War or of abolition, for example. In Harrington’s related analysis, this current division of labor between poetry and fiction in American literary studies is an artifact of critics (whatever their intellectual genealogies otherwise) having “[bought] into a New Critical ideology of poetry”: “In the professional imaginary, the corollary of poetry’s hypostatization is the notion that fiction provides a privileged access to history” (“Why Poetry Is Not American Literature,” 508). Exercising its historicist commitments almost exclusively on fiction and nonfictional prose, the new American studies, like the old, tacitly preserves poetry in its unexamined New Critical role as apolitical and asocial aesthetic object. And yet the generic particularity of poetry surely preceded the New Criticism, even if it did not take New Critical forms in the nineteenth century. Karen Sanchez-Eppler ´ assumes the historical, not retrospec-

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tively New Critical, particularity of poetry when she suggests in her Touching Liberty (1993), which draws on nineteenth-century American poetry, fiction, and prose in analyzing abolition’s rhetoric of the body and literary reactions to that rhetoric, that “analyzing lyric poetry . . . disables an emphasis on thematic political content and instead reveals how aesthetic, stylistic, and formal mechanisms come to accrue ideological significance.”4 This is not to issue an ahistorical brief for the unique formal apartness of poetry. Rather, along with Sanchez-Eppler, ´ I argue here that analyzing poetry can under some circumstances make evident with special force what is true of literature more broadly, that its social effects and its embeddedness in history lie not only in thematic political content, through which fiction enjoys its “privileged access to history,” but also in the politics of genre, which makes “aesthetic, stylistic, and formal mechanisms” available to authors. Beyond that, literature’s social effects lie in the changing politics and circumstances of the cultural field itself, in Pierre Bourdieu’s famous coinage, which makes authorship itself possible in different ways, at different times, for different social agents. In the current disciplinary circumstances of American literary studies, the study of poetry underlines with special force Tony Bennett’s observation, entirely in the spirit of Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, that literature “is not something whose social underpinnings must be sought elsewhere; it is a set of social conditions and its analysis consists in identifying the effects of these conditions.”5 Despite the enormous professional energies devoted in the last two decades to reviving a broader canon of nineteenth-century American writing, a great deal of the poetry written by nineteenth-century American women other than Emily Dickinson has yet to be analyzed along the lines laid out by Sanchez-Eppler ´ and Tony Bennett. My aim in this book is to demonstrate that this body of poetry can be not only anthologized but also read critically today. Reading the poetry written by nineteenth-century American women, I argue here, entails not only understanding how a given poem’s “aesthetic, stylistic, and formal mechanisms come to accrue ideological significance” but also understanding how particular social contexts or sites of poetry’s production and consumption supplied nineteenth-century American women poets with aesthetic and formal possibilities already endowed with social significance. As the book’s title schematically implies, my reading of nineteenthcentury American women’s poetry is embedded in the larger story of the nineteenth-century rise and elaboration of the cultural field in the United States: the emergence of modern forms of cultural hierarchy, including an autonomous realm of aesthetic “high culture,” in the United States, and of poetry’s movement within that field from the sites of didacticism to those of aestheticism. From School to Salon attempts to

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trace a broad shift in the social locations in which American women gained access to authorship in the genre of poetry: a shift from reading, reciting, writing, and publishing poetry in the didactic context of primary and secondary schooling to reading, reciting, and publishing poetry in the emergent later nineteenth-century venues of autonomous high culture, like the salon. Versions of this larger story have been told about nineteenth-century American culture by Lawrence Levine, in his Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988), and by Richard Brodhead, in his Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (1993), among other critics.6 Like Brodhead in Cultures of Letters, I approach this larger cultural history through close readings of exemplary literary works and exemplary authors’ careers. My aim is to perform for these poets the kind of reading Brodhead offers of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a reading that “shows how little the social situation of Alcott’s authorship is external to her work” and argues that indeed “one project of Little Women is charting the field of specifically artistic spaces that have opened up at the time of its writing” (Cultures of Letters, 102, 98–99). From School to Salon undertakes to read a set of nineteenth-century American women poets with a view not only to the social situations in which they wrote and were read but also with the assumption that these women’s poetic works themselves always formally embody, and sometimes selfconsciously chart, the differential possibilities for authorship within the cultural fields they inhabit. The project thus asserts and attempts to demonstrate that this body of poetry can and should be read in ways that bridge the gap between “internal” formalism and “external” historicism, between close readings of works and analysis of their historical conditions of possibility.7 I open by pairing two early nineteenth-century poets whose access to authorship was rooted in schooling: Lucretia Maria Davidson, a posthumously published child prodigy, the poetess as exemplary beautiful dead student, with her complement in Lydia Sigourney, the sometime Hartford schoolmistress who became the United States’ best-selling antebellum author of didactic sentimental poetry. Dead at seventeen of tuberculosis, Lucretia Davidson would live on in the afterlife of elocution textbooks aimed at molding other young ladies of her class; her life, writing, and death became exemplary of early nineteenth-century American transitions in women’s education. Lydia Sigourney, by contrast, actively managed her own transition from schoolmistress to didactic poet over the course of her long career, and in doing so became a central fashioner of the domestic-tutelary complex that enabled Davidson’s posthumous career as a prodigy-poetess. These chapters juxtapose

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extended readings of long poems written by Davidson and Sigourney, Davidson’s “Amir Khan” (the title poem of her posthumous collection of 1829) and Sigourney’s “Connecticut River” (first published in Samuel G. Goodrich’s 1828 gift book, The Token), with readings of exemplary scenes of instruction in posthumous biographies of Davidson and in Sigourney’s autobiographical prose. Davidson’s and Sigourney’s long poems, I argue, in their quite different ways both perform and critique early nineteenth-century relations between poetry and ambitious middle-class women’s schooling. For both Davidson and Sigourney, the cultural field surveyed is transatlantic as well as intra-American: Davidson’s “Amir Khan” displays its young author’s learning in the transatlantic idiom of romantic orientalism, and Sigourney’s prospect poem, centered on the American village with its schoolhouse, enters into a transatlantic dialogue of village poems that includes her American precursor Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1794) and stretches back to Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770) and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). The following two chapters pair Maria Lowell’s aesthetically ambitious abolitionist poetry with the Reconstruction-era poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Nineteenth-century American women like Lowell and Harper found in the abolitionist movement and in the postwar struggle for African American civil existence important occasions for writing poetry conspicuous for its political themes; at the same time, however, this body of poetry conducts its political arguments in the context of both implicit and explicit questions about cultural capital and aesthetic, as well as moral, education. Like Lucretia Davidson’s and Lydia Sigourney’s most ambitious poems, Maria Lowell’s and Frances Harper’s writings both incorporate and revise familiar nineteenthcentury scenes of instruction. Chapter 3 centers on Maria Lowell’s long poem “Africa,” written and published in the culturally elite precincts of the abolitionist movement (it appeared in the Boston Female Antislavery Society’s annual gift book, The Liberty Bell, in 1849), which trades both on the cultural capital of imported high British and European romanticism and on popular educational rhetorics and images of race for its poetic and political strategies. Like Maria Lowell’s abolitionist poetry, the poetry Frances Harper published after the Civil War functions simultaneously in different cultural registers—popular and elite, written and oral, religious and secular. As Frances Smith Foster observes, Harper’s mission in this poetry is “mediating between cultures,” speaking to African American audiences of enormously mixed literacies as well as back to white readers; it both represents and performs reconstructed models of education for African Americans.8 Chapter 4 reads Harper’s postwar poetry, then, both against works like Lowell’s “Africa” and

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Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Chambered Nautilus” (1858) and for its rich internal mediations between different forms of literacy and cultural capital, culminating in Harper’s great postwar diptych of Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869) and the “Aunt Chloe” sequence (published in Sketches of Southern Life in 1872). The chapter concludes with a look forward to Harper’s fate in American literary canon formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contrasting her absence from the Modern Language Association’s hardening college-level canon with Harper’s afterlife at the turn of the century in what was by then the more popular and heterogeneous discipline of elocution. Chapter 5 treats Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson, and chapter 6 the poet Annie Fields, better known as a Boston salon hostess and wife of James Fields, publisher of the Atlantic Monthly. Jackson and Fields, these chapters argue, made their careers within a later nineteenth-century American literary field increasingly structured by emergent formal and informal institutions of high culture and the ever-finer gradations their burgeoning made possible. For both Jackson and Fields, taking up these new positions entailed rejecting or modifying earlier nineteenth-century modes of becoming a woman poet, modes rooted in the domestic-tutelary complex and its instrumental, didactic understanding of women’s writing, in favor of a more autonomous sense of the aesthetic. Identified not with the women’s domain of primary or secondary schooling but with the great publishing organs of later nineteenth-century American high culture and their complementary performance space, the salon, Annie Fields preserved the memory of earlier generations of women writers (she was a biographer, for example, of her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe) but at the same time differentiated her generation from theirs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fields wrote, regarded “books as a medium of the ideas of the age, and as the promulgators of morals and religion”; what Stowe and her sister writers lacked, in Fields’s view, was “a study of the literature of the past as the only true foundation for a literature of the present”—that is, a sense of literature as an autonomous, self-generating, self-referential field of culture, the sense of high culture that had emerged in the United States by the nineteenth century’s end. Fields overtly laid claim to this elite territory in her classicizing poetry, replacing the domestic-tutelary complex’s scenes of instruction with scenes of high-cultural transmission; Jackson fashioned a more popular niche, closer to the middlebrow realm claimed by her editor and friend Josiah Holland but still informed by high culture’s refusal of didacticism. Understanding this later nineteenth-century cultural field in finer grain, I argue, illuminates Emily Dickinson’s much-disputed historical location—illuminates the refusals, to use Bourdieu’s term, around which she ordered her life and work.

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One of the Gilded Age elite cultural institutions Annie Fields had a hand in founding was the Harvard “Annex,” which would eventually become Radcliffe College, Adrienne Rich’s alma mater. Fields always regretted her lack of formal higher education, and with the exception of Emily Dickinson’s famous nine months at Mount Holyoke, none of the poets explored in From School to Salon attended college. To name the canonical women poets of twentieth-century American literature in connection with their college affiliations—Marianne Moore and H.D. at Bryn Mawr, Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar, and so on—against the popular women poets of the nineteenth century is to realize how decisively the sites of women’s poetry have shifted from the school to the university, with Annie Fields’s generation at the historical pivot point. Modernist women writers, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Suzanne Clark, and other literary historians have argued, lived and wrote this shift as part of their complex drama of affiliation with and disaffiliation from women writers of the nineteenth century.9 From School to Salon will bring its narrative of women, poetry, and schooling forward to close with a glance at the career of Adrienne Rich, whose work has been consistently but tensely allied with the modern university, from her early education at Radcliffe through her literacy work at the City College of New York in the sixties and her later affiliations with Douglass College (of Rutgers University) and Stanford University. What are the consequences for Rich’s poetry, when later twentieth-century feminist scholarship in the university begins to make the women’s nineteenth century available as an object of knowledge or cultural capital? On or about 1978, Adrienne Rich—along with many other feminist writers and academics—“discovered” the nineteenth century, and particularly nineteenth-century women’s history. Rich’s 1981 volume, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, significantly departs from her 1978 book The Dream of a Common Language in the degree to which it locates precursors for Rich’s twentieth-century feminist identity in women writers and activists of the nineteenth century. No sooner does nineteenth-century women’s culture become available for Rich as an object of identification, however, than it provokes a crisis of identification, as the race and class fissures of twentieth-century feminism mirror and replicate those of the nineteenth century, and indeed those of Rich’s own personal life and poetic career. The question my conclusion brings to Rich’s poetry—What are the consequences of recovery?—is a question, of course, for the whole of From School to Salon. Why recover obscure nineteenth-century women poets at all? In Mary Poovey’s provocative words, “Is there any point in recovering a writer’s work, just because the author belongs to a category—in this case, the woman writer—that we and our students con-

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sider important?”10 Poovey deduces from her own experiment in recovery (a virtuoso reading of Ellen Pickering’s obscure 1839 novel Nan Darrell) that “[a]s important to canonization as some universalist assessment of ‘quality’ is the ability of certain texts to tell us something about the imaginary wholes our discipline has been devised to illuminate: literary history, the history of gendered writing, the history of cultural ideas” (“Recovering Ellen Pickering,” 449). And yet she does not find her recovery of Pickering finally worth the trouble; “these novels,” Poovey concludes, “may help us recover the qualities that enabled a writer to subsist at the margins of popularity in the early nineteenth century, but they do not enhance our understanding of the early-nineteenth-century novel, of women writers, or even of something as amorphous as ideology” (448). The hermeneutic circle formed in the relation between the discipline’s “imaginary wholes” and its already-canonized individual works need not and perhaps should not expand to include more Ellen Pickerings. Pierre Bourdieu, however, would reply to Poovey not only that this circular mode of understanding is “intrinsically vicious” but that it is bound despite itself to “register, unwittingly, the way the ignored authors have affected, by the logic of action and reaction, the authors to be interpreted—the ones who, by their active rejection, have contributed to the others’ disappearance from history.”11 In Bourdieu’s argument, the discipline’s “imaginary wholes” drawn around familiarly canonized authors are always already structured by forgotten authors, without being able to reflect on that structuring. Describing somewhat different “imaginary wholes” would allow the discipline to include the objects of recovery—in both senses of “object,” the artifact and the aim with which it is sought—in critical understanding. As one reply to Poovey’s question, From School to Salon argues among other things for enlarging the objects of recovery projects—from individual authors and poems or themes to cultures of poetic literacy or cultural capital as embodied in poems and poets. What I ultimately want this book on nineteenth-century American women’s poetry to yield is not only a series of detailed readings of particular poems and poets but also a map of the changing cultural field of possibilities, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, in which these women poets emerged and which they helped shape. To borrow Patricia Crain’s formulation, reading these poets is an occasion “to witness the small change of cultural capital at work.”12 Beyond the sheerly antiquarian pleasures of delving into the archives, then, I hope this book will contribute to the emerging larger history of women’s relationship to literacy or literacies, as exemplified by Crain’s work and that of other scholars.13 The women poets and their readers who figure in From School to Salon played an important role in the

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institutionalization of an Anglo-American vernacular literary canon. At the nineteenth century’s beginning, these American women poets translated to the United States much of the ethos and the curriculum of the British dissenting academies that helped birth a vernacular English literary canon as the specific cultural capital of the rising bourgeoisie, distinct from the classical Greek and Latin literary curricula of Oxford and Cambridge.14 At the century’s end, Annie Fields participated in stratifying the (by then well-established) Anglo-American literary canon and helped rejoin that canon to the classical curriculum at its highest social and educational levels, both by insisting on the importance of classical languages in elite women’s higher education and through her poetic translations and imitations of Greek and Latin texts. The history of how nineteenth-century American women wrote poetry is part of a wider history of women’s access to particular forms of cultural capital. This is my own history as well, of course, as a college-educated woman writing from the literary precincts of the present-day university, a century after Annie Fields longed to enter Harvard. But it is also the history of educated men and of common readers, because the nature of cultural capital changed historically for everyone when women began to have broader access to it. In Nancy Armstrong’s words, “Today few of us realize that many features of our standard humanities curriculum came from a curriculum designed specifically for educating polite young women who were not of the ruling class, or that the teaching of native British literature developed as a means of socializing children, the poor, and foreigners before we became a masculine profession.”15 We all inherit the cultural world that obscure nineteenth-century American women poets helped to make.

CHAPTER ONE

Who Killed Lucretia Davidson?

In 1837, twelve years after her subject’s death at age seventeen from tuberculosis, popular novelist Catherine Sedgwick contributed a long biographical sketch of the poet Lucretia Maria Davidson to Jared Sparks’s Library of American Biography. Sedgwick’s biographical essay consolidated the reputation Lucretia Davidson had earlier won with her small posthumous collection, Amir Khan and Other Poems, assembled at the instigation of Lucretia’s mother, Margaret, edited by academician Samuel B. Morse, and published in 1829. Thus sponsored chiefly by women, Lucretia Davidson’s posthumous career as a poet had also, as Cheryl Walker has put it, a number of contemporary “male midwives,”1 Washington Irving and Robert Southey conspicuously among them. A few years later, Mrs. Margaret Miller Davidson would draw on similar forms of authorization—this time with Washington Irving supplying Sedgwick’s place as introductory biographer—in assembling and publishing the Poetical Remains of still another daughter, Margaret Miller Davidson, who also died of tuberculosis in her teens. The combined Remains of both sisters, together with Sedgwick’s and Irving’s biographies, were issued in a handsome new two-volume companion edition in 1841. Lucretia Davidson’s Remains sold well enough to circulate for several decades, in translations as well as in new American editions.2 In 1843, finally, Mrs. Davidson completed the family portrait when she “appear[ed] for the first time before the public” in her own person, with Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Margaret M. Davidson, introduced again by Miss Sedgwick, who justified Mrs. Davidson’s discarding “the diffidence natural to a recluse and delicate woman” by referring to those readers “who have expressed a curiosity to know more of the mind whose holiest and brightest emanations were infused into those rare sisters, who seem hardly to have touched our world on their passage to Heaven.”3 The combined 1841 Remains attracted the notice of Edgar Allan Poe, who damned them with faint praise and used them as a stick with which to beat on the Davidsons’ promoters.4 Even Poe’s ambivalent notice, however, had to concede that those promoters had been effective; indeed, that is half his grievance as well as half his fascination with the Davidson sisters. By the time Poe reviewed the composite Remains in 1841, he was well and ironically aware that “Lucretia Davidson” was a

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family enterprise, a cottage industry, a fulminating discursive formation, as well as the proper name of a dead girl. If, in his famous dictum, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” what seems to have intrigued Poe in the Davidson sisters—young, white, upper-middle-class, consumptive, dead, thus by convention beautiful, and “poetical” as both subjects and objects—was at least in part the cultural machinery brought to the making of this “poetical.” His review of Margaret Miller Davidson’s Remains opens with an account of her elder sister’s making as a poet: “The name of Lucretia Davidson is familiar to all readers of Poetry. Dying at the early age of seventeen, she has been rendered famous not less, and certainly not more, by her own precocious genius than by three memorable biographies,” those of Morse, Sedgwick, and Southey. The name and death of Lucretia authorize the appearance of her sister Margaret Miller, whose name and remains in their turn implicate yet another woman, the other Margaret Miller Davidson. “Few books,” Poe says of Margaret’s Remains, “have interested us more profoundly”: Yet the interest does not appertain solely to Margaret. “In fact, the narrative,” says Mr. Irving, “will be found almost as illustrative of the character of the mother as of the child; they were singularly identified in taste, feeling, and pursuit; tenderly entwined together by maternal and filial affection, they reflected an inexpressibly touching grace and interest upon each other by this holy relationship, and, to my mind, it would be marring one of the most beautiful and affecting groups in modern literature to sunder them.” In these words the biographer conveys no more than a just idea of the exquisite loveliness of the picture here presented to view. (74–75) What “interests” is precisely the relationships of interchangeability among the women. Death is the sign under which women’s identities are “ ‘entwined’ ” with one another (or, to recall Sedgwick on Mrs. Davidson, their “emanations . . . infused into” one another) with “exquisite loveliness,” also poetry, the representational result of that entwinement. But it is impossible in this context to forget that the Poe who in 1841 solemnly quotes Irving’s sentimental picture of women’s entwinement was also the author in 1839 of “Ligeia,” which tells a different story of how breath and identity pass from one dying woman’s body to another under a rapt male gaze. Poe’s gothic plot of shifting or “convertible”5 female identities mockingly haunts his reproduction of Irving’s sketch of the Davidson holy family, as well as the version of female poetry authorized by that sketch. As Rowena is to Ligeia in the realm of the gothic,

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so perhaps is Margaret Miller to Lucretia Maria Davidson in the realm of domestic literary sentiment. Casting Lucretia as the stronger poet of the two sisters (a judgment most readers, including twentieth-century readers, have sustained), Poe comments that Lucretia “had not, like Margaret, an object of poetical emulation in her own family. In her genius, be it what it may, there is more of self-dependence—less of the imitative.”6 Emulating her stronger sister, taking up Lucretia’s vocation under her mother’s and male literary mentors’ fond tutelary gazes, Margaret briefly lived, effusively wrote, and died writing. In the implicitly racialized nineteenth-century physiognomy of female genius to which Poe was so acutely attentive,7 it was Lucretia, like Ligeia, whose “complexion was the most beautiful brunette, clear and brilliant, of that warm tint that seems to belong to lands of the sun rather than to our own chilled regions” (in her biographer Sedgwick’s description); Margaret’s physical being by contrast can only be described vaguely as “fragile” and “delicate,” her “bloom” derived from her emulative disease rather than original and native.8 Is it Lucretia who rises from Margaret Miller Davidson’s just-cooling remains? And if so, what does this sentimental-gothic story of female entwinings, deaths, and resurrections mean for our understanding of the cultural work performed by American women writing poetry in the early nineteenth century? Poe’s contributions to the posthumous reputation of the Davidson sisters matter for my purposes not as evidence of his individual ambivalence toward ideal Woman, nor as representative instances of bygone literary tastes, but because they trace the uncanny “awareness of society’s mechanisms of control” that characterizes, according to Joan Dayan, Poe’s writings on women, including women writers.9 My purpose in looking at the Davidson sisters, especially Lucretia Maria Davidson, is to excavate some of the cultural machinery of poetry that Poe characteristically both operates and comments upon in his reviews. That machinery, as Richard Brodhead observes, is part of the larger cultural apparatus or pattern that Brodhead has termed the “domestictutelary complex” of mid-nineteenth-century American culture: the “theory of socialization,” emergent in the 1830s and 1840s, that sought to replace external bodily forms of discipline with humanized, domesticated, introjected bonds of love.10 According to Brodhead, “literature” is both the agent and the beneficiary of this social transformation; it both occupies and structures the privatized, disciplinary domestic space opened up, which is to say enclosed, in the 1830s–1840s. The literary genre privileged in Brodhead’s as in other accounts of this transformation, however, is the novel: “if the culture that formed around this model” of disciplinary intimacy

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“made a place for the novel in its midst . . . it was because the novel offered endlessly to renew its primal transaction: the transaction by which a near one opens a world of sympathy and through that act carries authority deep inside. The novel . . . gained this new home on this specification of its function: that it become another monitory intimate, another agent of discipline through love.”11 This emphasis on the novel’s centrality for nineteenth-century emergent bourgeois culture in the United States seems both theoretically and empirically well-founded.12 It has left relatively untouched, however, the question of what cultural work poetry found to do alongside the novel within American midnineteenth-century “cultures of letters.” The posthumous careers of the Davidson sisters, Lucretia and Margaret, coincided precisely with the 1830s–1840s rise of the “domestictutelary complex”; like the novel, but in somewhat different ways, the “Davidsons” both contributed to and benefited from this restructuring of social space. Their work and its reception illuminate the special role of poetry in both public and private arenas of instruction, in women’s public as well as domestic education, and so illuminate contested linkages between the public and private ends of the domestic-tutelary spectrum. Lucretia Davidson’s work especially—written mostly in the early 1820s, published complete, along with Sedgwick’s biography, in the 1830s, and still being reviewed in the 1840s—is intricately taken up in the new “disciplinary intimacy” of the 1830s–1840s. But her work also bears the stamp of Davidson’s own biographical experience in other discursive regimes, including her session at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary in 1824. As a writing subject and the subject of others’ writing, “Lucretia Maria Davidson” occupied a contested place between 1830s–1840s disciplinary intimacy and an older ideology of republican motherhood in the process of being revised, as Nina Baym has shown, for nineteenth-century purposes by women like Emma Willard. One of the fundamental issues at stake in the making of “Lucretia Davidson” in this contested place was whether Lucretia Davidson’s poems, those of her sister Margaret, and by extension other women’s poetry and indeed all middle-class women’s activities were to be viewed (in the terms of republican motherhood) as “educated efforts of the head” or (in the emergent terms of sentimentalism) as “untutored effusions of the heart.”13 Poetry, in other words, especially poetry by women, was an important staging ground in the early nineteenth-century United States for one of the classic antinomies of bourgeois thought: the dichotomy between head and heart, education and untutored spontaneity. And this antinomy, in its turn, is key to poetry’s role in fashioning and reflecting the cultural work of the “disciplinary-tutelary complex,” which forged

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both terms of the antinomy into a paradoxically spontaneous and literate discipline. To place the work of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson in such a context means taking issue with critical approaches to their work, and that of other mid-nineteenth-century American women poets, that implicitly depend on and reproduce this classic antinomy. Those few twentiethcentury readers who have looked at the poetry of the Davidson sisters have generally sorted through it with a particular aesthetic in mind (although not always explicitly announced): they have looked for poems of spontaneous domestic realism, poems that immediately and accurately reflect the privatized domestic realm of emotion that (it is assumed) Davidson knew as “real life.” Thus the entry on Lucretia Maria Davidson in Notable American Women devalues what it calls the “romantic trivia admired by [Davidson’s] contemporaries” and praises instead the occasional “realistic” poems of illness and fear authored by “a child who lived too long with sickness and death.”14 Cheryl Walker’s feminist reading of Lucretia Davidson assumes that women’s real emotions in private life may (should) include anger and rebellion but preserves the basic emotional-realistic assumption of immediacy and spontaneity, which leads to her valuing and dismissing much the same poems as does Notable American Women, and in rather similar terms: “Though ‘Amir Khan’ now seems a merely derivative exotic tale, Davidson’s shorter lyrics occasionally demonstrate an original sensibility.”15 The adjectives of derogation deployed in these readings, “romantic” and “derivative,” are not fully explained (derivative of what?), but their connotations overlap suggestively: they evoke feelings at once excessive and excessively mediated, excessive because mediated, indeed cultivated, through reading; feelings lettered, rather than feelings spontaneous. It is exactly this complex of connotations that needs further exploration. The critical strategy of sorting through the corpus of the Davidson sisters (and of other antebellum women poets) in order to segregate the “romantic” and “derivative” from the spontaneous, felt, and real forecloses inquiry into poetry’s role in the “disciplinary intimacy” described by Brodhead, and up to this point critically associated with fiction. Judith Fetterley has provocatively observed that Americanist scholars have been to this point more successful in recovering nineteenth-century American women writers than in getting them thoroughly and widely read: “I wonder if we have this investment in recovery because persons interested in these writers are having difficulty finding ways to write about them.” If we lack “interpretive strategies” (a term Fetterley borrows from Susan K. Harris’s study of women’s novels) for reading nineteenth-century women writers, this is even more true of poets than of

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writers of fiction.16 Interpretive strategies formulated under the aegis of one or another “repressive hypothesis” (in Foucault’s phrase, borrowed by Brodhead) and aimed at locating spots of rebellion or subversion have on the whole failed to revive nineteenth-century American women poets’ writing for critical reading, at least by comparison to the volume of work generated on fiction.17 Another strategy, then, seems called for. This chapter proposes that all of the Davidson sisters’ work, the apparently domestic-realistic poetry as well as the poems dismissed as “romantic” and “derivative,” is better understood under the aegis of “society’s mechanisms of control” than as emotionally spontaneous, transparent realism—and that this is not accidental but essential to the Davidsons’ enormous nineteenth-century reception. An illustrative anecdote from Washington Irving’s biography of Margaret Miller Davidson foregrounds the role of “disciplinary intimacy” in the growth of her poet’s mind. The first occasion on which Margaret spontaneously writes down a poem (she has previously volunteered rhyme orally and been made by her mother to write it down) comes in the wake of a domestic infraction and its consequent discipline: She had been reproved by her mother for some trifling act of disobedience, but aggravated her fault by attempting to justify it; she was, therefore, banished to her bed-room until she should become sensible of her error. Two hours elapsed, without her evincing any disposition to yield; on the contrary, she persisted in vindicating her conduct, and accused her mother of injustice. Mrs. Davidson mildly reasoned with her; entreated her to examine the spirit by which she was actuated; placed before her the example of our Saviour in submitting to the will of his parents; and, exhorting her to pray to God to assist her, and to give her meekness and humility, left her again to her reflections. “An hour or two afterwards,” says Mrs. Davidson, “she desired I would admit her. I sent word that, when she was in a proper frame of mind, I would be glad to see her. The little creature came in, bathed in tears, threw her arms round my neck, and sobbing violently, put into my hands the following verses: “Forgiven by my Saviour dear, For all the wrongs I’ve done, What other wish could I have here? Alas there yet is one. I know my god has pardoned me, I know he loves me still; I wish forgiven I may be, By her I’ve used so ill . . .”18

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Young Margaret writes down her poem in the first instance, as opposed to reciting it, because her mother has withdrawn her presence; her previous oral effusions have come at her mother’s side, or in her embrace. Punishment operates by withdrawal and reflection, and their concomitant production of writing, rather than corporeally.19 The “spontaneous” written domestic lyric certifies and preserves against future outbreaks of disobedience the truth of Margaret’s contrition, which might otherwise be uncertain because it takes place by definition in the privacy of reflective conscience and maternal withdrawal. Delivered to a wider reading public by Irving’s authorized biography, this scene of instruction shows just how effective poetry could be in instigating and witnessing to disciplinary intimacy. Indeed, it suggests how poetry—rhyme and “numbers” magically lisped by the untutored child—could furnish the privileged formal image of a spontaneous yet (and) literate discipline. The entire corpus of the Davidson sisters, those poems seen as spontaneously emotional effusions of domestic realism no less than those derogated (especially in twentieth-century criticism) as studious romantic exercises, is involved in the historical production and replication of this scene of instruction. In the authorized, widely consumed family mythology, the power of this scene is always, in one way or another, traced back to the poetic genius and early death of Lucretia Maria Davidson. Asking who killed Lucretia Davidson, and with what consequences, casts surprising light on poetry’s work in the making of the domestictutelary complex and in the shifting aims and interpretations of (middle-class) women’s education in the early nineteenth century. Who or what killed her? For Robert Southey, whose 1829 review of Lucretia Davidson’s posthumous poems did more than any other notice to establish their high literary credentials (in Poe’s sour observation, “This was at a period when we humbled ourselves, with a subserviency which would have been disgusting had it not been ludicrous, before the crudest critical dicta of Great Britain”),20 Lucretia was the tragic victim of her own ambitious intellectual powers: the “intellectual fever” which “seems to have gathered strength with her growth,” the “desire of knowledge . . . which possessed her like a disease” and which led to “so early, so ardent, and so fated a pursuit of intellectual development.”21 Southey apparently did not credit this tragic outcome primarily to any innate, specific incompatibility between feminine bodies and intellectual genius; his review lists Chatterton and Kirk White as Lucretia Davidson’s compeers in the familiar romantic tragedy of intellect consuming its bodily container. If, as Southey concludes, Lucretia Davidson’s case is a tragedy of education, it points to no reliable moral: “To those parents who may have the fearful charge of a child like Lucretia Davidson,

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these memoirs will have a deep and painful interest. They clearly indicate the danger, but afford no clue to the means of averting it.” Southey advances as the “first step” toward a remedy a hope in the democratizing effects of more universal education: as “genius” become less rare, “because wherever it exists it is now called forth by the wide extension of education (such as it is), and by the general diffusion of books,” in time “the conventional value which it has hitherto borne will, like that of precious stones, be necessarily abated.”22 His conclusions suggest that Southey sees the problem of the child prodigy–poet in terms that owe as much to class as to gender, or that even displace the model of gender with that of class. Catherine Sedgwick, writing her biographical essay on Davidson some seven years after Southey’s review, inherited the terms of Southey’s authorizing praise but interpreted and added to them in ways that mark Lucretia Davidson’s liminal place in changing orders of female education and middle-class women’s relationship to “intellect,” and that very nearly reverse Southey’s construction of the relations between gender and class. Tempering Southey’s fearful admiration for Lucretia Davidson’s consuming intellectual ambition, Sedgwick more anxiously and more thoroughly than he narrates the many occasions on which Davidson set aside her poetry in deference to the bonds of feeling—to perform domestic needs or feminine tasks prescribed by her mother.23 But it is Lucretia’s experience of formal education for girls—especially her single term at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary—that most exercises Sedgwick, through which Sedgwick explicitly genders and historicizes Southey’s redaction of Lucretia’s educational tragedy, in which Sedgwick seeks the cause of Lucretia’s death, and from which she draws a different “remedy” for the female prodigy’s condition than that envisioned by Southey. Solving what Sedgwick sees as the specifically gendered educational problem of the female prodigy entails fixing the boundary between the middle class and the working class more firmly. Since American society, in Sedgwick’s view, sets middle-class as well as working-class men to hard labor, that boundary must be fixed in the persons of women. “We now come to a topic, to which we would ask the particular attention of our readers”: thus Sedgwick solemnly broaches the matter of female education and its role in Lucretia’s untimely demise. She first charges formal education for girls with enfeebling their bodies by keeping them indoors, at their lessons, through seasons in which they need to take exercise: “When . . . the school-girl is confined to her tasks from eight to ten hours, in rooms sometimes too cold, sometimes too hot, where her fellow-sufferers are en masse, can we wonder at the result?”24 The imagined spectacle of the schoolgirls’ suffering bodies is prompted

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in large part by class anxiety; Sedgwick attributes the hectic compression of schooling in the United States “to the demand for operatives in every department of society in our country,” as if the education of middle-class girls, along with that of their aspiring professional brothers (“immured in colleges, law schools, divinity schools, &c”), was unhappily modeled on the labor requirements and working conditions of the factory. It is this misguided educational emulation of the factory operative, in Sedgwick’s view, rather than upper- and middle-class women’s increasingly normative confinement to the home and segregation from productive labor, that accounts for “the miseries of the more favoured classes of our females”—their “feebleness of purpose, weakness of execution, dejection, fretfulness, mental and moral imbecility!” And that such mothers raise children like themselves (whether by example or by a more literal bodily inheritance seems strategically unclear at this point as elsewhere in this drama of female influence), “there are hosts of living witnesses in the sickly, pale drooping children of our nurseries.”25 Sedgwick’s picture of sorry white middle-class nurseries and the women giving birth to them participated in a wider American cultural anxiety over the political consequences of national prosperity, especially as those consequences were thought to be both registered in and hastened by the spectacle of supposedly idle, frivolous, overconsuming middleclass women.26 By comparing oppressively schooled middle-class American schoolgirls to factory operatives, Sedgwick deflects anxiety over middle-class women’s prescribed idleness; not excessive private leisure but rather excessive public exertion, she claims, is responsible for the ills of “the more favoured classes of our women.” The excessive public exertions of this misguided brand of female education come to a head, for Sedgwick, in the controversial practice for which the Troy Seminary under Emma Willard’s direction was most famous: the public end-of-term oral examinations, which lasted for eight days and were attended not only by faculty, fellow students, and visiting family but by invited guests, even by members of the state legislature a few miles down the road at Albany.27 “How far this evil may have operated in shortening the life of Lucretia Davidson, we cannot say”; but Sedgwick condemns the examinations as “appalling to a sensitive mind” (58–59) and casts Lucretia Davidson as a historical martyr to what Sedgwick sees as a misbegotten educational remedy (the next thing to corporeal punishment) for middle-class women’s anxiety of place: “this fragile and precious creature was permitted by her physician and friends, kind and watchful friends too, to proceed in her suicidal preparations for examination! There was nothing uncommon in this injudiciousness. Such violations of the laws of our physical nature are every day committed by persons, in other respects, the wisest and the

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best; and our poor little martyr may not have suffered in vain, if her experience awakens attention to the subject.”28 Killed by the prospect and fact of the oral recitation, Lucretia Davidson in her martyr’s death points toward the promised land of emerging domestic-tutelary intimacy that she herself was not destined to see.29 Historically speaking, Lucretia’s lessons may indeed have been learned, built into the dominant midcentury American model of middleclass domesticity.30 In the Davidson’s family tale of female influence— which became the family’s public literary capital—the most immediate beneficiary of Lucretia’s educational martyrdom was her younger sister Margaret. As Washington Irving records the turning point in his biography of Margaret Miller Davidson: “It was now decided [when Margaret was about five years old, shortly after Lucretia’s death] that she should not be placed in any public seminary, but that her education should be conducted by her mother. . . . This maternal instruction, while it kept her apart from the world, contributed greatly to enhance her imaginative powers, for the mother partook largely of the poetical temperament of the child; it was, in fact, one poetical spirit ministering to another.”31 The disciplinary private space of “maternal instruction” mapped out by Lucretia’s martyrdom becomes the next generation’s scene of poetry. Yet its privacy is always already in some sense publicized, made into a spectacle by Lucretia Davidson’s posthumous fame. In Irving’s biography, not only do visitors come from the United States and abroad to speculate on just how closely young Margaret’s poetical, consumptive frame will fulfill the prediction of her sister’s, but this privacy is always already witnessed to and purveyed in writing, however much it eschews the public oral recitation mythologized by Sedgwick and Irving as the agent of Lucretia’s death. The family story of Lucretia and Margaret sets poetry directly in opposition to the schoolroom recitation: privately communicated between mother and daughter rather than publically recited for strangers, produced spontaneously by the individual child rather than required of students en masse, poetry lends itself generically, as we have seen, to what the Davidson family story frames as the coming of the new domestic-tutelary order. Even when thus summoned as the historical-symbolic antidote to Lucretia’s ordeal by public recitation, however, poetry is still regarded by all the authors of the Davidson family story with uneasiness: like a homeopathic remedy, a little of it administered in proper circumstances can cure; a lot will kill. But was there ever a woman in this text to be killed—was there a Lucretia Davidson before she was made into a book, is there a Lucretia Davidson apart from, or in addition to, the productive family machine of her posthumous reputation? That machine depends at every point on the fiction of “Lucretia”: she is the original who licenses all the copies

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made from her, copies made in bodies (as Margaret Miller is a slightly faded bodily copy of her older sister), as well as in souls and in published texts. Lucretia Davidson’s twentieth-century critical readers have approached this authorship machine with deep suspicion, uncertain of whether it harbors any ghost or body to be pulled from the cultural wreckage, and in doing so have reactivated its basic conundrum. Cheryl Walker sums up Lucretia Davidson as “the outstanding example of a type . . . the precocious female poet who died young and afterward became a legend.”32 But “type,” in this context, cuts two ways, suggesting both a “Lucretia” passively stamped out by her culture and one actively capable of reproducing others in her own mold. In either of these functions of “type,” “Lucretia Davidson” clearly poses troubling questions for feminist criticism’s efforts to reconstitute larger numbers of nineteenth-century women poets as authors, especially as authors actively resistant to their times in ways a subsequent feminism can appreciate.33 My own answer to the question of whether there was a Lucretia Davidson in excess of the effects posthumously secured for her name would be a qualified yes. But in excess of does not mean outside of or beyond the family machine of authorship: what is most striking now (and quite possibly to her contemporaries) about Lucretia Davidson’s poetry is rather the ways she found of representing her own predicament within that machine. This predicament is perhaps best glossed by the twentieth-century biographical narrative of a comparably ambitious and exhibitionistic female child prodigy–poet of the 1950s, Eve Kosofsky, committed to writing a few years ago by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: despite the historical distances between them, poetry seems to have provided both these adolescent girls with what Sedgwick calls the “thrilling image of gut- or groin-level resistance or impedance” and “the assumed framework of . . . an almost absolutely ruly and obedient child.” In the case of Lucretia Maria Davidson, as in the case of young Kosofsky, the child poet’s life and works offer no purchase for readings determined to frame questions in “liberatory as opposed to disciplinary” terms.34 Davidson’s poetry represents this entanglement of resistance with discipline in a variety of registers. She seems from the first to have written poetry at once in obedience to and in defiance of her mother: according to Sedgwick (whose authority would of course have been Mrs. Davidson), as a child she hid her verses from her family and burned them when some were discovered—but informed her mother afterward with “a sunny smile play[ing] through her tears” that she had done so.35 The richly ambivalent dynamics of this initiation into authorship, at age six, played themselves out over and over in Lucretia Davidson’s life, infect-

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ing the content as well as the motivational context of her poetry.36 A poem Lucretia wrote (according to her mother’s helpful posthumous note) at the age of thirteen complains, When’er the muse pleases to grace my dull page, At the sight of reward, she flies off in a rage; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . She torments me each moment, and bids me go write, And when I obey her, she laughs at the sight; The rhyme will not jingle, the verse has no sense, And against all her insults I have no defence. I advise all my friends, who wish me to write, To keep their rewards and their praises from sight; So that jealous Miss Muse won’t be wounded in pride, Nor Pegasus rear, till I’ve taken my ride. (“Lines, Written under the Promise of Reward”) In the domestic economy of the Davidson household as Lucretia experienced and codified it, poetry itself—meter, jingling so relentlessly in the very gesture of saying it will not—came to function as both reward and punishment, liberation and resistance, simultaneously both the most private and most public of the girls’ pleasures. What “Lines” complains of in the key of domestic humor, the poem for which Lucretia Davidson was most celebrated in the nineteenth century, her long poem “Amir Khan,” renders as a full-blown, orientalized allegory of the female poet. Coming to terms with Davidson’s place in emergent nineteenth-century domestic “disciplinary intimacy” is impossible without looking at how this much-celebrated and much-maligned poem circulated after Davidson’s death. From the beginning of Davidson’s posthumous reputation, “Amir Khan” seems to have been both the touchstone of Davidson’s claims to authorship and the primary locus of her readers’ resistance to the terms of that authorship. Sedgwick’s biography of 1837 alluded carefully to the poem’s already ambivalent reception: “ ‘Amir Khan’ has been long before the public, but we think it has suffered from a general and very natural distrust of precocious genius. . . . We think it would not have done discredit to our best popular poets in the meridian of their fame: as the production of a girl of fifteen, its seems prodigious.” (Sedgwick may well have picked up the word “distrust” by contagion from Southey’s review of Amir Khan, and Other Poems, which begins by acknowledging the “distrust” always inspired by retrospective accounts of child prodigies.) In his review of the Davidson sisters’ collected works, Poe pounced on Sedgwick’s defense of “Amir Khan” as “cant,” wishing that judgment of the sisters’

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“poetic ability,” as distinct from their persona characters, could “have spared us much twaddle on the part of the commentators upon ‘Amir Khan.’ ” For Cheryl Walker in the twentieth century, “Amir Khan” represents the worst of “derivative” exoticism.37 In the nineteenth century as well as the twentieth, and among readers of widely different persuasions, “Amir Khan” has been a powerful locus for readers’ anxieties about the dead female prodigy as a “type.” Lucretia Davidson’s long orientalizing poem, complete with her own footnotes (to Middleton’s Geography and various encyclopedias), mobilizes a still-active set of associations, connoting a poetry given over to mindlessly imitative ambition and uncontrollable mechanical (re)production versus a poetry gifting us with the spontaneous voice of feeling. And when these associations are yoked to the figure of the nineteenth-century sentimental dead girl poet, the worst anxiety is that this opposition will collapse on itself in the very place dedicated to its preservation. The anxieties provoked by the dead girl’s long poem are in themselves worth attending to. But so too, I think, is what that long poem itself has to say about the conditions of its production, which take us back to questions of women’s formal education and its relation to the emergent domestic-tutelary complex. If her mother’s attribution is accurate, “Amir Khan” was written in Lucretia’s sixteenth year, just before she went off to Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary. Whether or not this dating is accurate, whether the poem’s composition reflected Lucretia’s earlier boarding school curricula, her reportedly eager anticipation of life in the Troy Seminary, or her actual experience of that life, “Amir Khan” is immersed in the kinds of knowledge Emma Willard’s seminary (and other, less ambitious schools) purveyed to girls. Its pre-texts are not only Davidson’s fashionable schoolgirl readings in Milton and more recent British Romantic poets but also her readings in the kind of textbook geographies—combining what we would now call geography with geology, world history, and anthropology—that Willard herself had begun authoring and publishing in the 1820s.38 How Davidson uses these pre-texts will be important, but that they are used so conspicuously in “Amir Khan” is important in itself. Like the young poet Eve Kosofsky, Davidson’s intellectual armature is in this poem exhibitionistic from the beginning—but in the deeply anxious way of the sentimental female prodigy, unsure and unable to make her readers sure of whether she speaks voluntarily or under compulsion, who craves recognition (which is to say, love) but dreads its consequences. In terms of literary models for its setting and plot, “Amir Khan” works off Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Robert Southey’s long orientalist poem, “The Curse of Kehama,” as well as invoking Milton—both Paradise Lost and, less directly, Comus.39 It also relies implicitly on the

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uneasy fascination registered in schoolgirl geographies with Islam as an intermediate state of civilization, set between “savagism” and western European civilizations, whose liminal state was thought to be particularly marked by its treatment of women. (Schoolgirl orientalism was not only taught to schoolgirls, it held American schoolgirls up for display—and not only in Willard’s examinations—as the standard and acme of world civilization.)40 Like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Davidson’s Amir Khan has constructed a magnificent pleasure bower. In this bower he has enshrined and attempted to court a beautiful maiden, Amreta, who nevertheless refuses to speak or take pleasure in its sensual delights. “Amreeta” is the name given to the “cup of immortality” that the reluctant virgin is required to drink as token of her betrothal to the rajah at the end of Southey’s “Kehema.” Davidson apparently borrows Amreta as the name of her poem’s reluctant virgin, a “cold Circassian maid” who, unlike Coleridge’s “Abyssinian maid” with dulcimer, refuses her song and her love to the poet who wants to build paradise around her: . . . never from those lips of red A single syllable had fled, Since Amir Khan first blessed the hour That placed Amreta in his bower; Within that bower, ’mid twining roses, She sits unmoved, while round her flow, Strains of sweet music, sad and low; Or now, in softer numbers breathing, A song of love and sorrow wreathing, Such strains as in wild sweetness ran Through the sad breast of Amir Khan! “And had Amreta’s smiles been given, / This place had been the Moselem heaven.” But like the paradise on Mount Abora of which Coleridge’s “Abyssinian maid” sings, taken from Milton’s catalog of those pagan places “by some suppos’d / True paradise” (Paradise Lost, book 4, ll. 280–82), the paradise forestalled by Amreta’s resistance is presumably, from Davidson’s perspective, corrupted or delusive from the outset. As Emma Willard censoriously observed in her geography textbook of 1827, Islam “promised to believers a sensual paradise hereafter” (and, she thought, excluded women as soulless beings from that paradise); if Davidson’s Amir Khan is trying to make his sensual paradise in the here and now, Amreta’s refusal denies him this dream and implicitly asserts her possession of a soul.41 Significantly, however, the motive and meaning of Amreta’s resistance

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are unspecified at the outset of “Amir Khan.” Moreover, the effect of her silence and immobility is to make her, in certain respects, the more perfect sensual art object at the center of the pleasure dome: her brow is “changeless,” her aspect “like the Parian marble.” Pinned to her spot and tempted, Amreta is in a situation which recalls that of the chaste Lady of Milton’s Comus, also immured in “a stately Palace set out with all manner of deliciousness; soft Music, Tables spread with all dainties,” unable to rise from her chair.42 Like the Lady, Amreta immovably resists the pagan magician’s sensual blandishments; she will not open her lips or her nostrils to the bower’s entangling attractions to say what her captor longs to hear. “I had not thought to have unlockt my lips / In this unhallow’d air,” says Milton’s Lady, but she does so—only to lecture Comus on the power of chastity (ll. 756–57). Davidson’s Amreta, unlike Milton’s resistant virgin, issues no lectures and refuses to explain her resistance; absent a Christian context of belief and support for chastity, perhaps, Davidson imagines no coherent protest for her to make. Nor is it made completely clear what events led to her immurement in Amir Khan’s pleasure dome, what or whose magic keeps her in place there, whether external compulsion or her own will. If Milton’s Lady attempts to draw a sharp distinction between external, corporal compulsion and interior freedom as supported by God’s grace (“Fool, do not boast, / Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind / With all thy charms, although this corporal rind / Thou has enmanacled, while Heav’n sees good,” she tells Comus, ll. 663–65), this distinction is what “Amir Khan” crucially blurs in the person of Amreta.43 The crisis of the plot, instead of clarifying the distinction between corporal compulsion and interior freedom, further confounds it. In a final attempt to give Amreta speech—that is, to make her confess her love for him—Amir Khan takes a potion that makes him appear dead, having been advised by a “prophet” that if Amreta is worthy of love she will melt at the sight of his supposed corpse. His stratagem works, and the formal signature of its working is the production of a lyric poem, sung by Amreta over Amir Khan’s seemingly lifeless body: Start of the morning!—this bosom was cold, When forced from my native shade, And I wrapp’d me around in my mantle’s fold, A mournful Circassian maid! I vowed that rapture should never move This changeless cheek, this rayless eye, I vowed to feel neither bliss, nor love,— In silence to meet thee, and then to die!

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Each burning sigh thy bosom hath breathed, Has been melting that chain away; The galling chain which around me I wreath’d, On the morn of that fatal day! “My Heaven is only with thee!” she concludes, in words that overlay Milton’s famous prescription for Eve (“Hee for God only, shee for God in him,” Paradise Lost, book 4, l. 299) upon schoolgirl orientalism’s beliefs about Islam’s “sensual paradise” for men. What brings Amreta to lyric song, and resolves the crisis of “Amir Khan,” is not corporal compulsion but blackmail issuing from the bonds of love. But even in the moment of lyric revelation, with the glimpse it should be supposed to offer into Amreta’s secret, spontaneous feelings, distinctions between compulsion and voluntarity, externality and interiority, remain indecidable. Who or what initially “forced” Amreta? Did the will through which she imprisoned herself, took herself as her own object of compulsion, come upon her from the inside or the outside? Is love to be understood as the chain, that which melts it, or both? Is the vow of selfcompulsion Amreta takes at the end, when she thinks Amir Khan is dead, structurally any different from the one in which she vowed herself “changeless”? As elsewhere in Lucretia Davidson’s poetry, including her domestic lyrics—as perhaps more generally in antebellum American culture—lyric poetry in “Amir Khan” emerges from structures of feeling in which spontaneity and compulsion are vectors of the same discipline.44 In thus telling its fashionably orientalized “story” of the feminine lyric’s emergence, “Amir Khan” touches on matters closer to home for Davidson and, presumably, for the audiences latter fascinated by, or distrustful of, the sentimental girl-prodigy’s most ambitious poem. As a character, Davidson’s Amreta can be read in terms of a straightforward feminist defiance issued to the literary traditions on which the poem draws: she struggles, through her silence, to resist becoming Eve in Milton’s paradise or the muse for Coleridge’s pleasure dome, only to yield up her voice and her body in the end.45 (Amreta is poised to stab herself at the conclusion of her song, but Amir Khan comes to life in time to avert the looming Romeo and Juliet catastrophe, snatches the dagger away, and cradles his fainting bride-to-be as her “tide of life returns.” He may not have her for long: Amreta’s burning cheek, “beating pulse, and throbbing breast” suggest that her lyric has touched her with poetry’s consumptive bodily signs.) Such a reading of the poem as protofeminist critique certainly works to a point and can be combined with attention to the historical contexts of exhibitionistic schoolgirl orientalism that both enable and limit the boundaries of the poem’s critique.

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What this reading does not quite touch, however, in its hypostasization of an interior poetic subjectivity endowed with spontaneous defiance (call the subjectivity Amreta’s or Lucretia Davidson’s) is the way “Amir Khan,” along with the rest of Davidson’s work, along with her posthumous construction and reception, not to mention her sister Margaret’s copycat poetic career, frames just this subjectivity as the effect of the emergent disciplines of love. A final example of the afterlives of Lucretia Maria and Margaret Miller Davidson: by 1845, eight years after Margaret Miller Davidson’s death and four years after the first publication of her and Lucretia Davidson’s combined Remains, the Davidson sisters were ensconced in a standard pedagogical text, The Young Ladies’ Elocutionary Reader, a set of “reading lessons” compiled by Anna U. Russell coupled with “introductory rules and exercises in elocution, adapted to female readers,” by William Russell, an instructor at several female academies. (The Reader may well have been used as a textbook at Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary.)46 The Elocutionary Reader by its very nature puts on display the pedagogical disciplines connected in the 1830s and 1840s with the cultivation of spontaneous feeling; as William Russell observes in his preface, “the higher considerations of sentiment and principle,” along with literary merit, have not “been neglected, in the compilation of materials which necessarily become elements of thought and reflection, while repeated for the purposes of appropriate and impressive reading.” The desired end of all this elocutionary discipline is a female voice as spontaneous and liquid as nature, as untutored as a child: “There is, unquestionably, a fine analogy between the sound of the running brook, the note of the woodbird, the voice of a happy child, the low breathing of a flute, and the clear, soft tone” of a well-educated young lady.47 Once again poetry, especially but not only lyric poetry, seems the literary genre most adaptable to the purposes of an elocutionary discipline destined to sublate itself as spontaneous melody. This desired voice, and its bodily conditions of production, could not be further removed from the nightmarish scene of education-as-factory summoned up by Catherine Sedgwick in her biography of Lucretia Davidson, even though the educational method propounded by the Russells—oral recitations in the context of the female seminary—is exactly the one marked for Sedgwick’s special disapproval. Not surprisingly, The Young Ladies’ Elocutionary Reader is rich in contributions by women poets: Lydia Sigourney is the authority cited on the effects of reading in the introductory essay; Sigourney and Felicia Hemans figure frequently among the reading selections. A number of the Reader’s prose selections, however, prepare for, comment upon, or

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illustrate poetic selections, suggesting that prose in the Reader often serves to guide and discipline the possibly vagrant energies of poetic emotion, whether the poet is male or female. A short extract titled “The Sublimity of Wordsworth,” for example, prefaces his “Intimations” ode, and Russell’s introductory essay juxtaposes a perhaps riskily pantheistic passage from Coleridge’s “Hymn to Mont Blanc” (an apostrophe to the mountain that concludes with the poet “worshipp[ing] the Invisible alone”) with a prose paean to the “Sound of Sabbath Bells, in the City.”48 Poetry, it is clear, is best read in a visibly disciplined pedagogical context. True to this convention, the Elocutionary Reader chaperones poetry with explanatory prose for both the Davidson sisters, who are introduced with extracts from Sedgwick’s and Irving’s biographies. Further, both poetry and prose are prefaced with elocutionary instructions that aim at inscribing proper emotions in the young lady’s bodily decorum and very intake of breath, making them habitual, spontaneous, natural. (The elocution manual literalizes as instructional method the rhyme on “breathing” / “wreathing”—as in wreathed chains—that Lucretia Davidson had made in Amreta’s lyric in “Amir Khan.”) In reciting the extract from Irving titled “Early Traits of Margaret Davidson,” young ladies are instructed that “A clear, distinct utterance, and a lively but gentle tone, deepening into tenderness and solemnity, are the chief characteristics of the appropriate style of reading, in this extract.” In attempting the voice of Margaret Davidson herself, represented by her poem “To My Sister Lucretia,” they learn that “Admiration and joy, blended with tenderness and solemnity, are the chief elements. . . . The voice is soft but vivid, throughout, and sustained by a gentle warmth of feeling.” The coupling of Sedgwick and Lucretia Davidson elicits slightly different adjectives: Sedgwick’s “Character of Lucretia Davidson” is called “An example of ‘serious’ style, required the ‘moderate’ force of ‘pure tone,’—‘pitch,’ moderately ‘low,’—‘movement,’ deliberate,” while Lucretia Davidson’s “To My Mother” is also credited with gentle force, slow movement, and “subdued” pathos.49 One may well wonder how young ladies who were the objects of these elocutionary instructions managed to shade their tones distinctively enough to register such minute gradations of permissible female subjectivity. Still, the connotative differences between the “Margaret Miller Davidson” and “Lucretia Maria Davidson” of The Young Ladies’ Elocutionary Reader are consistent with the sisters’ differing contemporary reputations, as is the content of the prose extracts chosen to introduce them: Margaret is framed in her earliest childhood’s “dawning perceptions” and spontaneous religio-poetic raptures at her mother’s knee, while Lucretia is a “prodigious . . . genius” shadowed by

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possible “morbid development,” whose sense of duty may perhaps be more safely imitated than her poetic ambition. Lucretia’s low, deliberate force—hedged about with nervous editorial qualifications and quotation marks—points to a female will that perhaps too obviously displays its self-discipline as intellectual discipline, struggle, and self-sacrifice, and that is uncomfortably if poetically autonomous of the human ties of disciplinary intimacy: “Her mind was like the exquisite mirror, that cannot be stained by human breath.” In light of the pedagogical strategies of The Young Ladies’ Elocutionary Reader, Margaret Miller Davidson’s cultural function seems almost to have been to demonstrate for the 1840s that Lucretia Maria Davidson could be imitated with safety, albeit at a certain distance. Not entire safety, of course: however dilute her temperament compared with her sister’s, however tamed her sister’s dark poetic, intellectual, and bodily excess in her own person, Margaret Miller Davidson still lives and dies under the shadow of consumption that figures the inevitability of both her emulative vocation and her death. Margaret’s consumptive vocational self-sacrifice, however, allows her to mediate her dead sister’s voice for earthly audiences, pulling Lucretia back into the relational orbit of disciplinary intimacy and extending that orbit to heaven itself: I know that here thy harp is mute, And quenched the bright poetic fire; Yet still I bend my ear to catch The hymnings of thy seraph lyre. Teach me to fill thy place below, That I may dwell with thee above; To soothe, like thee, a mother’s woe, And prove, like thine, a sister’s love! (“To My Sister Lucretia”) “Teach me”: murdered by teaching, killed off in 1825 by public recitations (at least according to her biographer Sedgwick), Lucretia Maria Davidson by 1841 has been recovered as a pedagogical model for the recitations of young ladies. As education’s absent “martyr” (in Sedgwick’s word again), she provides the dangerous but necessary historical original on which subsequent tutelary loves can—must—be copied.50 Had he noticed the 1845 Elocutionary Reader, Poe might well have been intrigued by its potential as domestic-tutelary gothic: its open, earnest, literal staging of these strange pedagogical-poetical transactions between female bodies, these entwinements of revenant female identities in the bonds of imitative, disciplinary love.

CHAPTER TWO

The School of Lydia Sigourney

Within the emergent domestic-tutelary complex of early nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, the all-but-inevitable complementary figure to the poetess as student and child prodigy is the poet as schoolmistress. The career of the single most famous antebellum woman poet in the United States, Lydia Sigourney, was intimately bound up with her early vocation as a schoolteacher in Hartford, Connecticut. Those years in biographical fact were comparatively brief: the young Lydia Huntley’s first venture into school-keeping, made in partnership with her friend Nancy Maria Hyde, lasted about a year and a half; the school she then established under the sponsorship of Hartford grandee Daniel Wadsworth prospered for some five years, eventually enrolling twenty-five students each year, before she left schoolteaching permanently in 1819 to marry Charles Sigourney. “The five years thus spent,” Sigourney would later write in recalling her period as a schoolmistress, “is a sunny spot amid life’s changeful pilgrimage.”1 Brief though this period was, however, Sigourney’s published writings returned over and over again to her experience as a schoolteacher for their authority. To highlight only a few points in this lifelong trajectory: significant portions of Sigourney’s first book, Moral Pieces, in Prose and Verse, published by private subscription of Hartford’s leading citizens in 1815, originated (as the North American Review observed in its respectful notice) “as compositions, addressed to young ladies under the writer’s charge.”2 Her second, anonymous book collected the literary remains of her partner in teaching, Nancy Hyde.3 In the full flower of her midlife fame, Sigourney published under her own name The Girl’s Reading-book, followed by The Boy’s Reading-book, which duly found their way into schools under the sponsorship of the American Common School Society.4 More than a decade later, she collected some further literary remains of her own pedagogical years as Letters to My Pupils (1851), a medley comprising essays she had written years before in response to student questions or compositions, a memoir of her own schooling and schoolteaching, and eulogies of former pupils. Sigourney’s Lucy Howard’s Journal (1857) is a semiautobiographical novel of female education; her posthumous Letters of Life (1866) among other topics elaborated on the account of her teaching career she had already given in Letters to My Pupils.5 As an author, Sigourney fully lived the

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moral admonition she addressed to her envisioned print-pupils in The Girl’s Reading-book: “This whole life is but one great school. From the cradle to the grave, we are all scholars” (11). Despite the considerable difference in their biographical life spans, Sigourney’s career as a published teacher-poet ran roughly in parallel to Lucretia Davidson’s posthumous career as a prodigy-poet. Born in 1791 to a Revolutionary War veteran and his second wife, Sigourney would survive the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, while Lucretia Davidson, born in 1808, would not survive her teens. Yet the first edition of Davidson’s literary remains, appearing in 1829, was almost contemporary with Sigourney’s Poems; by the Author of “Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse” (1827), which marked Sigourney’s half emergence from the anonymity her husband had enforced on her publications after their marriage—and perhaps her acceptance, as well, of her earlier reviewer’s advice to concentrate on poetry over prose.6 The heyday of Sigourney’s reputation was framed by her signed collections of poetry (most of it previously published in periodicals)—beginning with Poems (1834) and continuing through Pocahontas, and Other Poems (1841) and Illustrated Poems (1849), brought out in an expensive edition uniform with the publisher’s previous editions of Bryant and Longfellow.7 The height of Sigourney’s fame thus overlapped with the publication of the combined Remains (1841, followed by subsequent printings through the 1840s and 1850s) of the Davidson sisters, as did the waning of her reputation along with theirs in the 1860s and 1870s. Sigourney’s career as a published writer, like the posthumous publication career of the Davidson sisters’ poetry, straddled the emergence of the domestic-tutelary regime—but with the crucial difference, of course, that Sigourney lived and wrote through these transitions and shaped her career to them as they, in turn, took some of their form from her widely popular example. The mediator of moral school-craft, Schoolcraft’s Indian lore, and universal Enlightenment histories in her earliest publications, Sigourney partially remade herself into a more consistently lyric poet with an increasingly valuable publishable name in the domestic-tutelary complex of the 1830s and 1840s, before finally succumbing in the late 1850s and 1860s to a shift in the nature of the literary to which she could not fully adapt herself. To understand Sigourney’s writing as straddling this transition may help us understand the full scope of her career and so may suggest ways of reading her oeuvre as a whole in the social contexts of its production and reception. Like readings of the Davidson sisters’ writing, most considerations of Sigourney’s works to date, including recent feminist readings, proceed by splitting, selecting one genre over another as best exemplifying Sigourney’s poetics—or at least as best representing what

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ought to interest us here and now in her poetry. For the purposes of present-day feminist criticism, there are at least two Lydia Sigourneys: the staunch republican historical writer, on the one hand; and on the other, the ur-sentimentalist poetess of child elegies. (Annie Finch’s early proposal of perhaps a third Sigourney, the nature poet, has produced fewer followers but may be due for reconsideration.)8 Nina Baym’s enormously influential essay of 1990, “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” reinvented for present-day critics Sigourney as the popular scribe of republican American history.9 Sigourney’s image as the antebellum American sentimentalist, Baym charged, is a partial and reductive creation: “The Sigourney of the consolation elegy, the funerary poem, the Sigourney obsessed with dead children and dead mothers, has been constituted by a succession of critical audiences, each basing its commentary and opinion on an ever smaller segment of the author’s published writings” (67). By Baym’s painstaking empirical count, covering Sigourney’s major collections of poetry from 1827 through 1841, elegies of every sort—and not all of those elegies, as she points out (68), are for children or mothers—amount to no more than “32 percent” of Sigourney’s poetic production in these representative collections (67). The real Lydia Sigourney for Baym’s purposes, or at least the majority Sigourney—the unacknowledged 68 percent of the poetess, not to mention the prose author—is the Sigourney who aimed for the status of “Republican public mother,” an author who aimed to “enter the public sphere and influence the formation of public opinion” (70). Seen in this guise, rather than in the costume of the domestic sentimentalist, Sigourney’s politics, frankly declared in her historical writings, “emerge as a self-conscious advocacy of the tenets of ‘classical’ (i.e., conservative) Republicanism in an age of increasing liberalism; as an urging of the merits of nonsectarian evangelical Christianity on an increasingly disputatious and fragmented religious scene; and as an effort to reconcile the civic with the spiritual realms in an amalgam of Protestant Christianity and republicanism” (71).10 Baym’s assessment of the ideological matrix of Sigourney’s writing is the most powerful and widely informed reading of her work extant, and this chapter will draw on it liberally. Yet it has not banished Sigourney the sentimental elegist from feminist consideration; invoked in passing in the 1980s by Cheryl Walker and Jane Tompkins,11 this Sigourney reemerges center stage in Elizabeth Petrino’s comparison of Sigourney and Emily Dickinson as child elegists.12 Sigourney herself frequently acknowledged the salience of her elegiac work in her public reputation, most famously in her rollicking catalog in Letters of Life of the many readers who wrote to her requesting elegies for their beloved spouses, children, and starved pet canaries.13 As Baym concedes, elegy, if not the

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only or numerically dominant genre of Sigourney’s poetic output, certainly was significant in it, at almost one-third of her poems. Moreover, if we were to extend Baym’s empirical method into Sigourney’s later books, for example, by including her more uniformly elegiac volumes The Weeping Willow (1847) and The Man of Uz, and Other Poems (1862), the ratio of elegies to other kinds of poems might change; more significantly, so might our sense of the typical tone and subject of her elegies, as well as the relative weight of various topics or genres among the nonelegiac two-thirds of Sigourney’s poems.14 I do not propose to extend this genre-by-genre count but rather to suggest and demonstrate ways of reading Sigourney’s work as a whole. More accurately, perhaps—since no complete bibliography of Sigourney’s sixty-plus authored and edited volumes and innumerable periodical contributions exists, and none of her recent critics, myself included, will claim to have read all of her work15 —I propose that we need for Sigourney, as for Lucretia Davidson and other nineteenth-century American women poets, a sense of her own writing as a field within a larger cultural field of possibles, to again invoke Pierre Bourdieu’s terms. The question is less one of exactly how much relative space different genres occupy in Sigourney’s or Davidson’s poetry than what work these genres are doing next to one another in the poet’s writings, and how each poet’s generic mix implies her sense of how she imagined her entry into authorship—into the wider field of possibilities for American poetry and American women’s writing. Sigourney herself, at the end of her life, summed up her career in self-deprecatingly comic terms that yoked her labors in diverse genres to her trademark brand of literary professionalism, her way of finding standing in the literary field: “If there is any kitchen in Parnassus, my Muse has surely officiated there as a woman of all work, and an aproned waiter” (Letters of Life, 376). Nor was Sigourney alone as a woman of all generic work in Parnassus. As Baym elsewhere observes, most of the volumes of poetry published by American women before the Civil War were medleys of many poetic genres; indeed, Baym aptly nominates the antebellum “women’s miscellany” itself as a kind of supergenre, a book form comparable in the diversity of its generic juxtapositions to women’s periodical verse.16 Baym’s productive suggestion that we might well “think of [Sigourney’s] elegiac verse as another, individualized form of history writing” (“Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” 80–81) gestures toward what seems to me the necessary work of reading the genres of Sigourney’s work—and, by extension, those of other women poets of the antebellum miscellanies—in relation to one another. Her observation that “[t]he social construction of Lydia Sigourney began . . . in her own lifetime” and “with Sigourney’s canny participation” (66) indicates another dimension of

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that work of reading: unlike Lucretia Davidson, dead at seventeen and brought forward posthumously in a book, Sigourney over her lifelong writing career monitored her own reception and shifted her own selfconstruction as an author, including the field of her own interdependent literary genres, in response to a changing field of literary possibles. To these intimations of how to read Sigourney whole, I would add another: I propose that we consider the school as the common social location of Sigourney’s characteristic literary genres, history and elegy—as the matrix of the social relations of Sigourney’s poetic and prose genres, inseparable from their matrix of republican ideas. Attending to the matrix of schooling will foreground the relationship between Sigourney’s historical thematics, especially of nationhood, and questions of language, especially literary language. Often referred to in her lifetime as “the American Hemans,”17 Sigourney along with Hemans becomes one of the chief figures anchoring the vernacular antebellum Anglo-American canon of common schooling—a role in which we have already glimpsed her, presiding with Hemans over the elocution readers in which the Davidson sisters ghostly declaimed. An epigrammatically convenient way of framing the differences between the regime of the “Republican public mother” (in Baym’s phrase) and its overlapping successor, the “domestic-tutelary complex” (in Brodhead’s), is to ask of each: Is the authority of the teacher modeled on that of the mother, or that of the mother on the teacher? For Lydia Sigourney, the role of the teacher came first, not just biographically but historically, ideologically, and almost, it seems, ontologically.18 Ideologically, Sigourney’s conservative republicanism inclined her decisively toward the pedagogical as the foundation of women’s cultural authority. As she wrote in her often-reprinted Letters to Young Ladies (1836): “The natural vocation of females is to teach. . . . It is true, that only a small proportion are engaged in the department of public and systemic instruction. Yet the hearing of recitations, and the routine of scholastic discipline, are but parts of education. It is in the domestic sphere, in her own native province, that woman is inevitably a teacher.”19 The category “mothers,” for Sigourney, is a subset of the category “teachers,” the second, broader category identical with womanhood itself. Biographically as well as ideologically speaking, the teacher preceded the mother in Sigourney, inasmuch as she taught for some years as a young unmarried woman and ceased teaching upon her marriage (a very common pattern for New England women of her generation). Yet Sigourney entered her new life still thinking of herself, by her later testimony, as “a schoolmistress and a literary woman” (Letters of Life, 268), and it was very much as a schoolmistress and a literary woman

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that she envisioned her duties as stepmother to Charles Sigourney’s three children by his first marriage: “I anticipated much pleasure in promoting their improvement, the habit of teaching having become almost an essential part of my nature, while it was an object of my supplications that I might be permitted to share their affections, and enabled in some measure to supply the unspeakable loss of a departed mother” (Letters of Life, 260). In the grammar of affections and practice as well as of Sigourney’s sentences, the teacher precedes the mother. “It was particularly pleasant to me to keep up in some measure the habitudes of teaching with our very bright and attractive children. I simplified for them portions of geography, history, and Scripture, illustrated by stories, and by degrees formed sets of written questions, by whose aid they might review and rivet their little gatherings in memory. Highly gratified were they when father chanced to be an auditor” (Letters of Life, 268). Compare this scene of Sigourney’s teacherly mothering with Washington Irving’s anecdote of the child Margaret Davidson spontaneously producing a lyric poem for the mother who rebuked her: although the locus in the home is the same in both stories, Sigourney makes quite clear her assumption that the sorts of linguistic competence she demands of her children-pupils do not emerge spontaneously out of the mother-child bond but out of the openly disciplined routines of schooling. Rather than setting the spontaneous emotive and poetical learnings of the home against the school, as Irving does in his memoir of Margaret Davidson, Sigourney reproduces in the home the instructional relations of the school, most centrally the public recitation (its public status signified by the father who may supply the audience at any time) of memorized material. By her own autobiographical accounts, Sigourney’s emphasis on schooling as the primary human relationship was not a matter of biographical contingency but rather the earliest instinct of her being, virtually coterminous for her with subjectivity itself: The ruling tastes of the mind, are revealed by its reveries. Could the inner life of individuals be scanned, it might be found, that the strong aspirations of childhood for any pursuit or occupation, is [sic] often verified in future years. . . . My own predominant desire, lowly yet persevering, and coeval with the earliest recollections, was to keep a school. This furnished the principal drama of my reveries, and mingling with snatches of song, and fragments of rhyme, that came I knew not whence, peopled and gave a voice to all solitude. . . . . . . In the most cherished and vivid pencillings of fancy, I was ever installed in the authority and glory of a school-mistress, counselling,

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explaining, or awarding premiums, always listened to, regarded and obeyed. And my scholars were all precocious, plastic, beautiful, and deserving of distinction. (Letters to My Pupils, 149–51) All deserving, but not equally deserving: as Sigourney further elaborated on this fantasy in her late autobiography, she was given to “arrang[ing] her dolls in various classes, instructing them not only in the scanty knowledge I had myself attained, but boldly exhorting and lecturing them on the higher moral duties. According to their imagined progress or obedience, they were elevated from shelf to shelf in the baby-house, which, being a capacious beaufet [sic] of carved oak, with many compartments, was favorable to this gradation of discipline.” Little wonder, with such extensive pedagogical experience behind her, that the fouryear-old Sigourney entered school “as a sort of adept [in] the modus operandi” (Letters of Life, 187); or that she felt it a “severe disappointment” to be removed from school at thirteen, when her parents feared she had learned enough and perhaps too much for a young woman.20 In her most cherished biographical myth, Sigourney represents her vocation of schooling as itself unschooled, a vocation seemingly by its nature imitative but, for her at least, an imitation without an original. By a kind of metalepsis of cause and effect, the schoolgirl enters the school already a teacher, spontaneously disciplined because a spontaneous disciplinarian. Written some fifteen years after Letters to My Pupils, Letters of Life as a whole would soften Sigourney’s earlier version of her autobiographical self-as-teacher, prefacing its account of Sigourney’s childhood vocational reveries (mainly cannibalized from Letters to My Pupils) with a more Wordsworthian recollection of her upbringing. Immersed in a bucolic Connecticut landscape and nurtured by loving parents, the child in Letters of Life takes her first inspiration from the natural sublime rather than intimations of schooling: “The earliest pictures of Memory, and they hang still unfaded in her gallery, are of rude ledges of towering rock, which were to me as the Alps, and of the rushing and picturesque cascade of the Yantic, creating the same class of sensations that were, in after years, deepened to speechless awe at the thunderhymn of solemn, sublime Niagara” (Letters of Life, 5–6). She also dabbles remorsefully, in her attic, in forbidden, sensational literary pleasures along with teacherly ranking of her dolls: “Finding a borrowed copy of ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ in the house, and perceiving that it was sequestrated from childish hands, I watched for intervals when it might be abstracted, unobserved, and . . . revelled among the tragic scenes of Mrs. Ratcliffe” (Letters of Life, 28). The revised and expanded account of her childhood in Letters of Life reflects, I suspect,

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Sigourney’s at least implicit awareness of how dated her earlier selfpresentation had become in the literary marketplace of the 1860s: she needed to supplement the picture of the four-year-old conning her teacherly part with a more current, more romantic version of the growth of the poet’s mind if she was to claim any part in an adult realm of genteel literary culture increasingly setting itself apart from the literatures of pedagogical discipline.21 Yet neither Sigourney herself nor her readers, by then a dwindling number, could ever entirely leave behind the generative link between Sigourney’s mode of authorship and early nineteenth-century American social relations of schooling. As the New Englander phrased its ambivalent 1866 summary of Sigourney’s life achievement, “Mrs. Sigourney seems to have been born a teacher, quite as certainly, to say the least, as she was born a poet.”22 In both their 1851 and 1866 versions, Sigourney’s childhood reveries of schoolteaching imply that the social relations of schooling have a life of their own, at least partly autonomous of any particular intellectual content: the four-year-old girl’s intellectual knowledge may, as her adult perspective indulgently allows, have been scanty enough, but that fact seems in no way to have hindered the elaboration of her pedagogical fantasy. Indeed, Sigourney represents the fantasy itself as the precondition for acquiring the positive knowledge she would need to fulfill her fantasies as an adult: Nor were those dreamings [of becoming a teacher] quite destitute of utility. As they created a deeper indwelling in the profession which I had secretly chosen, they gave also some practical preparation for it. When old enough to become a pupil, and inclined to question, as beginners are prone to do, where can be the necessity of so many studies and such tiresome repetitions, a bright vision, that they might be useful to my own scholars gleamed before me, dispelling scepticism, and putting weariness to flight. If an abstruse problem, or intricate Latin idiom, perplexed comprehension, and put childish patience at a stand, the thought that this knowledge would be expected of me, when I became a teacher, infused new energy and a conquering courage. (Letters to My Pupils, 151–52) When Sigourney eventually did establish her own school, intended for girls from the best families of Hartford, its reputation for rigor was based as much on its practical routines as its intellectual curriculum: “Our rules, which savored somewhat of the ancient regime, keeping in view the principle that strictness prevents severity, were received in the spirit of unity and love. Each one seemed to realize that order and industry were essential to the ends for which as a body politic we held existence” (Letters to My Pupils, 178).

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This is not meant to trivialize the importance of intellectual substance to Sigourney’s genuine success as a schoolmistress. She happily entered into “the wish of the patrons of the school that the ornamental branches should be omitted, and the time of their children devoted to a thorough and somewhat extensive course of study” (Letters to My Pupils, 179).23 Central to that course of study, as Nina Baym emphasizes, was history, “the core of a republican woman’s education” (“Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” 70). “Especially it was interesting to unfold with them the wide annal of history,” Sigourney recalled of her young scholars (Letters to My Pupils, 180); history, as she wrote in the earlier Letters to Young Ladies, “imparts knowledge of human nature, and supplies lofty subjects of contemplation” (151), demonstrating “the value of just laws and the duty of subordination” (10). World-historical subjects would be especially conspicuous in Sigourney’s earliest major publications following her teaching career, her long poem Traits of the Aborigines of America (1822), a footnoted historical epic in blank verse heavily laced with comparisons between American Indians and ancient civilizations of the world, and the Poems of 1827, which treated similar themes—the “Rival Kings of Mohegan, Contrasted with the Rival Brothers of Persia,” “Caroline Matilda, to Christian the Seventh of Denmark”—on a smaller scale. She returned to historical themes again in force with her Zinzendorff, and Other Poems (1836), which surveyed in its title poem and shorter poems the progress of Christianity in missionizing the world. Zinzendorff, however, joined Traits of the Aborigines among Sigourney’s less popular published offerings; although she returned to historical subject matter in her favorite long poem, Pocahontas, Sigourney would never again publish entire volumes as relentlessly and broadly historical as these earlier books.24 Sigourney may well have subordinated or softened history’s role in her poetry in response to the verdict of the literary marketplace. Yet it would be too simple merely to say that history recedes as a subject in her writing. Rather, history’s early importance as the intellectual substance of Sigourney’s curriculum and as theme in her poetry goes in tandem, over the course of her career, with a certain increasing emphasis by Sigourney herself on the historicity immanent in the methods of her teaching, in the social relations of schooling as such, independent to some extent of their curricular matter. Sigourney signals that historicity quite clearly when she recalls that her school’s disciplinary practices “savored somewhat of the ancient regime” yet were accepted by both students and teachers as “essential to the ends for which as a body politic we held existence”: like the more perfect union of the American nation, the small republican union of the school, formed by consent of its members to a common rule, escapes the excesses of other, less self-

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disciplined revolutionary bodies politic. No need even to dignify the French Revolution by historical name: the conservative classical republicanism that Baym so accurately identifies as Sigourney’s lifelong political faith inheres in such descriptions of pedagogical method just as much as in the intellectual substance of Sigourney’s school. In fact, the specific intellectual matter of Sigourney’s historical curriculum has all but vanished from her account “My Schools” by the time Sigourney writes Letters to My Pupils, in 1851—and still more from her “Educational Reminiscences” in Letters of Life (1866). Sigourney’s later writings consistently tell us not so much what she and her pupils read in history, but how they read it: How much did I enjoy unfolding with them the broad annals of History. Seated in a circle, like a band of sisters, we traced in the afternoon, by the guidance of Rollin, the progress of ancient times, or the fall of buried empires. Each one read an allotted portion of those octavo pages with a slow, distinct enunciation, that all might without effort comprehend. At the completion of the reading the book was closed, and each related in her own language the substance of what she had read, questions were asked on the most important parts, pains taken to impress on the memory the dates of important facts, and encouragement given to express their own opinions of heroes, or other distinguished personages. Even now I seem to hear, like the varying tones of music, their sweetly modulated voices, praising deeds of generosity or pity, or expressing surprise that the great were not always good, or amazement that artifice, revenge, or cruelty should sometimes have stained those names whom the world had pronounced illustrious. How rapidly passed the hours spent in each other’s society! Often when the duties of the day were closed, and the period of dismission had arrived, if our course of study had been peculiarly interesting, or particularly difficult, they would gather closely around me, like a swarm of honey-laden bees, seeking conversation or explanation, while the gentle entreaty, “oh, stay a little longer, please!” was so imperative, that the lowering summer sun, or the wintry twilight, drew over us unawares. (Letters of Life, 203–4) Redolent of the elocution handbooks, this passage both describes and performs the generic drift that characterizes Sigourney’s career as a whole: the passage of historical narrative into elegiac lyric, as the fall of empires shades into the twilight of every common day. The first paragraph minutely itemizes what the second paragraph naturalizes, the pedagogy that produces the students’ “sweetly modulated voices.” Out of the busy hives of pedagogical history emerge honey-laden lyric women,

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as Sigourney modulates her earliest authorial identity, that of the Spartan republican teacher, into the more intimate disciplines of the domestic-tutelary complex.25 In passages like this one, both Letters to My Pupils and Letters of Life imply that lyric poetry, especially elegiac lyric, is what remains behind—what remains to print—when the intellectual curriculum and the concrete social relations of Sigourney’s “ancient regime” republican school begin to vanish into memory. Letters to My Pupils especially suggests an entire imaginary genealogy of lyric’s emergence out of the matrix of republican schooling, the matrix it shares with Sigourney’s more overtly learned and didactic historical themes. When Sigourney’s pupils devise a “rural festival” to mark the first anniversary of their school, for instance, they incorporate poetic song into an improvised pastoral masque of female virtue: [T]he most interesting feature of the scene, to many young hearts, was the placing with appropriate ceremonies, a crown of woven flowers on the head of her, who throughout the whole year, had excelled in all amiable virtues. Her election had been by the vote of her companions, subject of course to my approval and confirmation. There were poetical addresses to the Queen, and her courtly answers, and song, and sweet discourse, and the reception of group after group, as they arrived on the grounds, and entertainment at the rich board, where every guest was duly pressed by the ardent and untiring hostesses. (Letters to My Pupils, 196) Sigourney and her pupils would continue to meet, year after year, for their anniversary festival—long after the school itself was disbanded. With the passage of time, the school community memorialized in the anniversary pastorals expanded to encompass “the blessed cares of the housekeeper or the mother. . . . Ere long, there were carpets spread upon the fresh, green turf, where the little ones sat or gambolled, with glad, wondering eyes” (Letters to My Pupils, 197–98). And with the passage of time, the pastoral song of the school festival modulated into elegy, as former students or their children died and were annually memorialized in eulogy and song. Quite literally, then, Letters to My Pupils represents elegiac lyric as the print trace of the social relations of schooling, relations that in their turn exceed and survive the actual school institution and its intellectual curriculum. Sigourney ends “My Schools” in Letters to My Pupils with a poem composed for the occasion when her school’s “26th anniversary found me a voyager upon the tossing ocean” (during her European tour of 1840–41); she supplies her absence by bidding her former students to

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keep your festival of love, ’Neath summer skies of sparkling blue, For ne’er conven’d in Attic grove A group so lovely and so true. (Letters to My Pupils, 202) Absent in the flesh, the teacher in spirit still “pours [her] precepts on your ear,” reminding her pupils that Unmark’d may dazzling beauty fade, So rudely years their changes wreak, Hope vanish like the evening shade, And pleasure as the rose-bud’s streak, Wealth on swift pinion fleet away, Ambition miss its lofty goal, But life’s last throb shall bless the day When knowledge enter’d to the soul. The poem gestures to the positive intellectual content of Sigourney’s remembered school only in the most general literary-figurative terms, as the “classic fields” in which teacher and student sojourned together. The real subject of its elegy is the social relations of the school, in which knowledge came, with fruits of peace, With genial friendship’s sacred power, And charity, that fain would ease, Of want, and woe, each suffering hour. ’Twas good to journey by your side, O’er classic fields, with studious care: How sweet your plastic minds to guide, How blest your hallow’d joys to share. Ask ye for some who are not here? They of glad smile and radiant eye, And voices like the song-bird clear? You call,—they render no reply. With myrtle fresh, and stainless rose, Be their turf-pillow duly drest, And treasure tender thoughts of those Who there in holy slumber rest. (Letters to My Pupils, 203–4) Sigourney concludes with advice for those of her students who have survived or will survive into motherhood, calling upon them to safe-

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guard the precincts of schooling for the children who will soon inherit them: Lead hither, too, your infants’ feet, And teach them with their sports to blend Those sacred lessons high and sweet That make the Sire of heaven their Friend. So for an unborn race, your zeal Shall guard this consecrated ground, And for their bosoms’ casket seal Such gems as here their mothers found. (204) —including, performatively, such gems as this keepsake poem itself. As so consistently in Sigourney’s oeuvre, the teacher-student relationship in this poem precedes and models the mother-child relationship. And the chief object of female elegy, at least according to Letters to My Pupils, is not the mother or the child but the student mourned by her teacher.26 The final section of Letters to My Pupils, titled “My Dead,” collects the anniversary festival eulogies of twenty-six of Sigourney’s former students, many of them concluded with short mortuary verses authored by Sigourney for the occasion: Will that lov’d voice in tuneful cadence pour Its sweet recital on my ear no more? No more with mine that earnest eye engage To scan the riches of the historic page? (“Julia Norton,” Letters to My Pupils, 214) So early called! How brief the space Since thou, enwrapped in youthful grace Amid the haunts of studious thought, For classic knowledge meekly sought. (“Mary H. Pitkin Norton,” 248) ’Tis sad, yet pleasant to remember thee As when I first beheld thee, meek and sweet, And bending with a student’s deep intent Over thy daily lesson. Thou wert twined As in a rose-wreath, with the fervent group Of fair and joyous creatures, while swift years Fled all unheeded by. (“Eliza Grew,” 300) I follow in thy train, thou who didst love To sit so close beside me with thy book,

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Lifting thy speaking eye, to scan my face, And time thy questions wisely to my cares. (“Frances Ann Brace,” 310) In some of these elegies Sigourney mourns her student in her other social roles—as the bride, the wife, the matron, eventually the missionary and schoolmistress in her own turn. But for Sigourney’s purposes these relationships emerge out of the primary ties of schooling. In the poems’ inevitable variations on their central horticultural metaphor—uniting educational cultivation, the bonds of domesticity, and Sigourney’s own well-wreath’d verse—the mother emerges out of the scholar’s bud, leaves behind the “rose-wreath” of pupils for “home’s blooming garland,” and then is “smitten ’mid the plants she reared” (“Miss Mary Lathrop,” 292–93), only to be resurrected in the rhetorical flowers of Sigourney’s elegy: I count it joy, I count it honor to have shed one drop Of dew upon thee, in thy budding hour, Risen as thou art from labor to reward, Ineffable, eternal, as the God Who was thy trust from life’s unfolding dawn. (“Miss Eliza Grew,” 302) These elegies are not, and do not claim to be, minute portraits of individual character. Rather, as one contemporary reviewer observed of Sigourney’s poems more generally, in them “we have presented to us the type . . . in its simple unity, abstracted from all individuality.”27 The “type” is the virtuous republican female pupil; the elegiac poems in Letters to My Pupils are less revealing about the individual pupils memorialized in them than they are about the social matrix surrounding them. The real object of Sigourney’s mourning in Letters to My Pupils is the school itself; the social relations of schooling are the true matter of her elegies. Perhaps Sigourney’s elegies for schooling are not surprising to find in a book devoted to reminiscences of her school and her pupils. Such elegies make a kind of direct emotional sense in her late-life autobiographical writings more generally: successful and well regarded as a young woman teacher, Sigourney was apparently less happy over time in her marriage, from which perspective it was easy for her to look back upon her teaching years both with nostalgia and with a view to generating literary capital.28 But her elegies for schooling pervade much of Sigourney’s writing, especially after the 1820s, and the nostalgic autobiographical motive by itself does not explain either the prevalence of

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the genre in her work or, more important, its widespread popularity among antebellum American readers. Sigourney’s popular Girl’s Reading-book of 1837, for example, like the later Letters to My Pupils, is stuffed with poems elegizing the social relations of schooling—and remarkably short, by comparison with Sigourney’s poetry of the 1820s, on the intellectual matter of history. In this textbook collection aimed at young girls, no less than in the later autobiographical writings, elegiac lyrics seem to function as the trace of a more general historical content that has dropped away.29 And here as in Letters to My Pupils, the social relations of schooling themselves are both the primary object of Sigourney’s elegiac muse and the generative paradigm for other human relationships. Sigourney thus begins the poetry section of The Girl’s Reading-book with “Teacher’s Excuse.” An old favorite of hers, originally published in her Moral Pieces (1815) under the title “An Excuse for Not Fulfilling an Engagement,” “Teacher’s Excuse” makes a teacher’s apologies for not keeping a promise to a friend; she has been detained, she explains, by students clamoring for her to “Please tell us whence that river sprang, “And where those mountains rise, “And when that blind, old monarch reign’d, “And who was king before, “And stay a little after five, “And tell us something more.” (Girl’s Reading-book, 201) What the poem directly conveys is not geography or history but the pleasurable bond of the teacher with her student. The teacher-student bond goes on to model the mother-child bond, illustrated in a poem following “Teacher’s Excuse,” titled “Ark and Dove”: here the motherspeaker versifies the biblical story of the flood for her daughter, offering up “the warm teaching of the sacred tale” (Girl’s Reading-book, 207). Similarly, the father in “A Father and His Motherless Children” laments to his children the absence of the mother whose teaching, based in love, “could to wisdom’s sacred lore / Your fix’d attention claim” (Girl’s Reading-book, 229). Later poems in The Girl’s Reading-book, including “Exhibition of a School of Young Ladies” and “Scholar’s Tribute to an Instructor,” return to elegizing the social relations of schooling directly: Yet more than what I speak, to thee I owe, And richer gifts than strains so weak can show; Thy warning voice allured my listening youth

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To seek the paths of piety and truth, And heaven’s first hopes, as vernal sunbeams roll, Dawn’d from thy prayers upon my waiting soul. (“Scholar’s Tribute to an Instructor,” Girl’s Reading-book, 232) Still others, like “Recollections of an Aged Pastor” and “On Meeting Pupils at the Communion Table,” extend the elegiac relations of schooling into religious sensibility, modeling the pastor on the teacher and the church itself upon the school: When gathering round a Saviour’s board, Fair forms, and brows belov’d, I see, Who once the paths of peace explor’d, And trac’d the studious page with me, Who from my side with pain would part, My entering step with gladness greet, And pour complacent, o’er my heart, Affection’s dew-drops, pure and sweet, When now, from each remember’d face, Beam tranquil hope, and faith benign, When in each eye Heaven’s smile I trace, The tear of joy suffuses mine. . . . . . . . . . . . . And may the wreath that cloudless days Around our hearts so fondly wove, Still bind us, till we speak they praise, As sister spirits, one in love . . . (Girl’s Reading-book, 223) The sacramental meal in this poem condenses Christ’s Last Supper with the sacred rites of schooling; the fellowship of the church memorializes the bygone sisterhood of the school. Repeatedly, then, the poems in Sigourney’s Girl’s Reading-book take the social relations of schooling (rather than its specific intellectual content), or the rewriting of other social relations in the key of schooling, as their theme. The same is true of the short prose essays in the first half of The Girl’s Reading-book, which offer up meditations on such general subjects as “Education,” “Memory,” “Order,” “Perseverance,” and “Female Energy,” followed by a few individual portraits of well-educated women, heroines out of Sigourney’s personal pantheon of ancient regime republican schooling.30 The girl addressed by The Girl’s Reading-book will not find in it, however, direct means toward acquiring the

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actual knowledge possessed by these heroines of a former age. The Girl’s Reading-book, like Sigourney’s portrait of her four-year-old self as pedagogue in Letters to My Pupils, amply demonstrates that the social relations of schooling have a life of their own, partly autonomous of any particular scholarly matter. Considered as a textbook, The Girl’s Reading-book seems designed to inculcate purely the habitus of schooling, in Bourdieu’s terms: that is, it inculcates an embodied “relation to culture over culture” itself, over culture construed as positive knowledge. Indeed, Sigourney might almost have written The Girl’s Readingbook to illustrate Bourdieu’s caustic observation that “initiatory” education and literary education are the limit cases of the situation in which “the relation of pedagogic communication can perpetuate itself even when the information transmitted tends toward zero.”31 We might add that initiatory and literary education aimed particularly at girls, in Sigourney’s time, increasingly focused on transmitting a specific relationship to culture, on the social relations of the domestictutelary complex, over culture itself. The contrast between Sigourney’s Girl’s Reading-book and her Boy’s Reading-book suggests as much: although well supplied with general essays and poems such as “Uses of Education,” “The Old School-House,” and “The Death of the Righteous,” the “lessons of republican simplicity” printed in the Boy’s Reading-book also contain scraps of positive knowledge in the form of essays such as “Insects” and “Shell Fishes,” as well as poems recalling Sigourney’s earlier historical vein, such as “The Prayer on Bunker’s Hill,” “The Chair of Uncas,” and “The Charter Oak.”32 Sigourney’s poem “The Fire-side,” included in The Girl’s Reading-book, makes this division of educational labor between boys and girls explicit. Responding to the mother’s question, “what have you brought to our own fireside?” the boy and girl of the family answer in ways that reflect their increasingly gender-typed experiences in primary education: Then the studious boy from the storied page, Look’d up with a thoughtful eye; That knowledge was there, which doth charm the sage, And shine like a flame through the frost of age, With radiant majesty. A girl was there, like a rose on its stem, And her bird-like song she pour’d; Beauty and music a brilliant gem Shook from their sparkling diadem, To enrich the evening hoard. (“The Fire-Side,” Girl’s Reading-book, 245)

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Boys are apportioned studious literate knowledge (signified in verse by a few extra syllables in the poem’s meter in his stanza); girls, spontaneous lyric song—the print trace of the republican histories that an earlier Sigourney placed at the center of young woman’s educations. “The Fire-Side” was not addressed only to children; Sigourney also printed it in her Pocahontas, and Other Poems (1841).33 Similarly, most of the poems in The Girl’s Reading-book that I have identified as elegies for the social relations of schooling had already appeared or would later appear in Sigourney’s most popular collections of poetry aimed at a general audience. For instance, “Teacher’s Excuse,” as already noted, was originally “An Excuse for Not Fulfilling an Engagement” in her Moral Pieces (1815); “On Meeting Pupils at the Communion Table” became “On Meeting Several Former Pupils at the Communion Table” in her Poems of 1841;34 “Exhibition of a School of Young Ladies” had appeared in her Poems of 1827; “Ark and Dove” in the Poems of 1834, and later in Sigourney’s Illustrated Poems (1849).35 The contrast between Sigourney’s Boy’s Reading-book and her Girl’s Reading-book, then, especially the prevalence of elegies for the social relations of schooling in The Girl’s Reading-book, marks not just a local problem in the gendered histories of primary schooling, but a significant episode in the history of the category of literature in the antebellum United States— and in the relationship between American literature and nationhood. Near the end of The Girl’s Reading-book, after working their way through its shorter elegiac lyrics, students would have encountered a poem titled “The Village,” giving them the chance to cut their teeth on a longer, more ambitious work than any other Sigourney chose to include in the anthology. A version of the classic eighteenth-century prospect poem, composed in heroic couplets, “The Village” is also the most nearly historical poem in The Girl’s Reading-book, historical in the double sense of its subject matter and its ancient regime poetic form. By virtue of both its genre and its placement, “The Village” seems intended to set the domestic-tutelary relationships celebrated and elegized in the Reading-book’s earlier poems in a wider social frame, one that implies relationships among schooling, literary language, and national identity. The poem opens with a paired portrait of “The farmer, filled with honest pleasure” at the sight of his orchards, flocks, fields, and sons, and “His thrifty mate, solicitous to bear / An equal burden in the yoke of care,” superintending the loom, the cheese press, and her children (Girl’s Reading-book, 229). This couple establishes the poem’s quasihistorical setting in the idealized world of independent agrarian virtue, but they are not the center of the poem’s interest. With the prospect

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poem’s self-marking injunction to “See,—” the gaze of the speaker moves directly from the agrarian patriarch and matriarch to a more fully realized scene of—what else?—the village school: See,—toward yon dome where village science dwells, When the church-clock its warning summons swells, What tiny feet the well-known patch explore, And gaily gather from each rustic door. The new-wean’d child, with murmuring tone proceeds, Whom her scarce taller baby-brother leads, Transferr’d as burdens, that the housewife’s care May tend the dairy, or the fleece prepare. Light-hearted group, who carol loud and high, Bright daisies cull, or chase the butterfly, Till by some traveller’s wheel arous’d from play, The stiff salute with glance demure they pay, Bare the clear’d brow, or stretch the sunburnt hand, The simple homage of an artless land. The stranger marks amid their joyous line, The little basket whence they hope to dine, And larger books, as if their dextrous art, Dealt most nutrition to the noblest part:— Long may it be, ere luxury teach the shame To starve the mind, and bloat the unwieldy frame. The genre of the prospect poem affords Sigourney still another method for foregrounding the social relations of schooling over schooling’s particular intellectual content: the conventional “stranger” passing by, enjoined to look at this scene, sees not the overt lessons conducted in the temple of “village science” but rather their results in a habitus signaled by the children’s spontaneous freedom, their dutiful care for one another as well as for their own bodies, and their democratic, self-respecting, unobsequious courtesy toward passersby. In its context in The Girl’s Reading-book, “The Village” in effect offers its student-readers lessons in how they should aspire to appear in the gaze of any “stranger” who may happen to look at them. The history of the common school movement—the venue in which The Girl’s Reading-book was originally published and distributed— reminds us that a good many of the young girls reading the lesson of “The Village” would have been doing so in the expanding urban centers of the antebellum United States rather than in the self-sufficient pastoral village represented in Sigourney’s poem.36 Such young girls would have been less likely to be “marked” in their deportment by a stranger pass-

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ing through an isolated village than by, say, a visitor or inspector touring their school. In other words, “The Village” uses the prospect genre to frame the antebellum social relations of common schooling in a historical fiction, offered up as an imaginary mirror in which its student readers may see and compose themselves, their schooled selves. This historical fiction is, of course, a national fiction, as becomes clear in “The Village” when the children’s democratic deportment is metonymically referred to the “poor, lost Indian” sleeping beside “our patriot sires” of the Revolutionary era in the village graveyard which is inevitably the stranger’s last stop on his tour of the village. Yet “The Village” as printed in The Girl’s Reading-book is not Sigourney’s fullest representation of this national fiction. Although nothing in the (very minimal) apparatus of The Girl’s Reading-book alerted its readers to the fact, “The Village” is actually an abridged version of a poem that Sigourney printed at the head of her 1834 Poems as “Connecticut River,” the title under which it was published (and won the poetry prize) in Samuel G. Goodrich’s gift book The Token (1828) and under which Sigourney eventually included it in her canonical Illustrated Poems (1849).37 The village school is still at the heart of the prospect surveyed in “Connecticut River,” but the longer version of the poem sets yet another literary-historical frame around the school, a vitally important frame for understanding how Sigourney yokes literature to nationhood around the image of the school. The full poem’s original title both locates the ideal village in a determinate historical setting, the Connecticut River valley (Sigourney’s home territory), and connects that historical setting to the classical literary topos of the river of eloquence. The opening lines of “Connecticut River,” left out of the schoolroom version of “The Village” (perhaps as too allusive and complex to gloss for young readers), in turn connect the local setting to world history—world history conceived as the rivalry of civilizations and as linguistic rivalry for the title of “classic song”: Fair River! not unknown to classic song;— Which still in varying beauty roll’st along, Where first thy infant fount is faintly seen, A line of silver ’mid a fringe of green; Or where near towering rocks thy bolder tide To win the giant-guarded pass doth glide; Or where in azure mantle pure and free Thou giv’st thy cool hand to the fervent sea. Though broader streams our sister realms may boast, Herculean cities, and a prouder coast,

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Yet from the bound where hoarse St. Lawrence roars To where La Plata rocks resounding shores, From where the arms of slimy Nilus shine, To the blue waters of the rushing Rhine, Or where Ilissus glows like diamond spark, Or sacred Ganges whelms her votaries dark, No brighter skies the eye of day may see, Nor soil more verdant, nor a race more free. (Poems [1834], 13) The virtues of the Connecticut River model the virtues of the civilization it fosters: various in the world it comprises, “free” along its entire length, victoriously “bold” at need but never roaring, stagnant, or overwhelming, the Connecticut stretches its moderate hand out to a more troubled world, like the child later in the poem who “stretch[es] the sunburnt hand” to the stranger passing through the village. Sigourney’s verse itself is comparably moderate yet capable in linguistic rivalry as she ventures discreetly into the onomatopoeia so characteristic of the neoclassical fluvial poem, moving from the sibilant and labile l and s sounds of the infant river to the hard g and t of its bolder stretches. Sigourney’s opening boast that the Connecticut River is “not unknown to classic song” marks her poem’s homage to its immediate precursors in the work of the Connecticut wits and, especially, to Timothy Dwight’s long prospect poem of 1794, Greenfield Hill, Dwight’s bestknown work in what William Dowling aptly calls the genre of “Connecticut Georgic.” In fact, “Connecticut River” comes close to being a redaction of part II of Greenfield Hill, “The Flourishing Village.”38 In claiming that the Connecticut River has already been memorialized in the “classic song” on which her own poem implicitly builds, Sigourney is of course staking America’s nationalist claim already to have produced a classic literature—a claim that depends for its force on the broader prior assumption that classic literary traditions can be produced in vernacular languages such as American English. Yet that nationalist claim is complicated in interesting ways for Sigourney, and for Dwight behind her, because the language and theme of both “Connecticut River” and Greenfield Hill are overtly derived from British models: Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770) most nearly, and more distantly but inevitably, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751).39 The most significant linguistic rivalry in “Connecticut River,” the nearest and tensest for the national standing of the United States in “classic song,” is not with the Ilissus or the Rhine but with the unnamed Thames.40 In terms of their overt thematics of nationalism, both “Connecticut River” and Greenfield Hill reply to Goldsmith by representing that the

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English village life devastated by enclosure and economic oppression in “The Deserted Village” is reconstituted on the other side of the Atlantic, becoming the social basis for a republican agrarian nation in the United States. America, say both Dwight and Sigourney, is not the howling wilderness of “matted woods,” “poisonous fields,” and “savage men” depicted by Goldsmith but rather the land wherein Goldsmith’s idealized village has been replanted, minus the depredations of kings, lords, and “Trade’s unfeeling train” (“The Deserted Village,” ll. 349–56, 63). “No griping landlord here alarms the door, / To halve, for rent, the poor man’s little store,” according to Dwight; in America “Freedom walks erect, with manly port” (Greenfield Hill, II.81–82, 159). The village’s displacement westward does not exile its grieving inhabitants to “that horrid shore” lamented by Goldsmith (l. 346) but instead liberates them as independent citizens of a self-sufficient agrarian community.41 The very sameness of the literary language that Dwight and Sigourney share with Goldsmith underscores the difference-in-sameness that is the burden of their replies to his “Village.” From this common point of departure, however, Sigourney’s poem proceeds to diverge from Dwight’s. Two enormous, in fact book-length, deletions of historical matter stand out: Sigourney exiles the American Revolution from her poem (the subject of part III of Greenfield Hill, “The Burning of Fairfield”), as well as the Indian wars (the subject of Greenfield Hill’s part IV, “The Destruction of the Pequods”). What Sigourney’s poem supplies in the place of these grand historical narratives is an elegiac sense of place—place become poetic topoi: first the idealized schoolyard, and then the churchyard in which the “poor, lost Indian” and the soldiers of the Revolution rest side by side. Her treatment of these two places together encapsulates Sigourney’s gendered historical distance from Dwight’s “classic song,” a distance ultimately measurable in Sigourney’s sense of American English as a literary language and women’s eligibility to write in it. By contrast with Sigourney, Dwight represents the social relations of schooling as a place of some tension or ambivalence for “The Flourishing Village.” Schooling is hierarchized in Greenfield Hill, divided (as he puts it in the poem’s “Argument”) between the “Academic School” and “Inferior Schools”—the former a locus of pretension potentially at odds with Dwight’s description of the village as a place “Where one extended class embraces all, / All mingling, as the rainbow’s beauty blends, / Unknown where every hue begins or ends” (II.171–74). Dwight contrasts the village’s elementary school, “the humbler mansion . . . / Where infant minds to science [sic] door are led” (II.561–62), and its companion “modest” schoolhouses in villages all over New England, “Where every child for useful life prepares, / To business moulded, ere he knows its cares” (II.573–74), with a half-satirical portrait of a classi-

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cally oriented village grammar school whose “grave preceptor” doles out “ambitious learning” (II.368–69) based on a little Latin and less Greek:42 Some half-grown sprigs of learning grac’d his brow: Little he knew, though much he wish’d to know, Inchanted, hung o’er Virgil’s honey’d lay, And smil’d, to see desipient Horace play; Glean’d scraps of Greek; and, curious, trac’d afar, Through Pope’s clear glass, the bright Mæonian star. (II.371–76) This schoolmaster receives more condescension at Dwight’s hands than does any other inhabitant of the village: “Many his faults; his virtues small, and few; / Some little good he did, or strove to do” (II.381–82). His “Academic School” is inferior to its own pretensions, unlike the “Inferior Schools” in their honest utility. He seems most true to himself, most pithy in his diction, and most immune to Dwight’s criticism in his popular, vernacular moral narratives, of which Dwight provides an extended sample in the form of a tale contrasting two cottages, one the abode of sloth, the other of industry (II.397–552). The urbane poet poking fun at this curious schoolmaster was himself, of course, a classically educated graduate of Yale College and became its president in the year following the publication of Greenfield Hill. Moreover, during his time as minister in the real Greenfield Hill, Dwight had established a successful village academy, run on much more rigorous principles than the “Academic School” of Greenfield Hill, that attracted boys, and some girls, from around the country to a curriculum said to rival that of Yale itself.43 Dwight’s classical learning fully qualifies him, as his readers full well know, to judge the half-learning of the village preceptor; yet the perspective from which that judgment is issued exceeds the boundaries of the fictional village itself, and its ultimate social location in the elite college is nowhere directly represented in “The Flourishing Village.” Nor can it be, since to do so would be to decenter the primacy and republican self-sufficiency of the village.44 But if such village schoolmasters were to abandon their pretensions to teaching the Greek and Roman authors in favor of the homespun vernacular didacticism that Dwight represents as their genuine idiom, how would the “striplings” they teach ever begin to prepare themselves to enter Yale? Classical literary education is thus, momentarily, a sore point in Greenfield Hill, indicating a gap in what Dwight prefers to regard as the continuous social spectrum of republican America.45 Sigourney tries to seal that gap in “Connecticut River,” in part by the poem’s opening gesture of taking Dwight and his fellow Connecticut

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poets as her precursors in “classic” song, and so imagining an American literary tradition capable of supplying its own classics in the vernacular. It follows, then, that she imagines a village of one school (eventually construed in retrospect as the precursor of the common school, when she later excerpts the poem for The Girl’s Reading-book): no need for an academy of “ambitious learning” to create class distinctions among literacies in the social fabric of the village. Further, the single school of Sigourney’s village does not create the distinctions among literacies along gender lines implied in Dwight’s poem (“every child” attends Dwight’s “Inferior Schools,” but seemingly only male “striplings” the classical academy, still less Yale College beyond Greenfield Hill’s horizon).46 Its vernacular literacies are taught alike to the little girl and the baby brother she leads. Through its picture of village schooling, “Connecticut River” presents in idealized form something of the social conditions that will enable the emergence of women writers in numbers into the vernacular literary canons of schooling. Enter the woman writer here, historically speaking—and yet Sigourney does not enter her directly, not at this point in “Connecticut River.” Instead she directs her poem into the churchyard, where “The poor, lost Indian slumbers in the shade” and “our patriot sires with honor rest” (15)—that is, where she condenses the historical matter of Dwight’s Greenfield Hill, the Revolutionary War and the destruction of the Pequods, into elegy. Following Dwight’s example, Sigourney will effect her poem’s transition from schoolyard to churchyard with the assistance of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” another British model against which she will assert difference-in-similarity, and out of which Sigourney will ultimately birth an elegiac, domestic national woman poet. Gray’s speaker, meditating on the country churchyard, famously contrasts the peasants lying unknown and unmemorialized there with the historical figures of the English civil war: Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast,

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The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood. (ll. 29–32, 45–48, 57–60) Being debarred from ambition entirely, the peasants resting in this churchyard are thereby fortunately spared ambition’s crimes—or so Gray’s famous stanzas seem to say. The peasants’ situation, as John Guillory and others have argued, allows the speaker of the elegy to reflect indirectly on his own position, not just as a man bound like them to the graveyard but more specifically and anxiously as an ambitious poet of the emerging bourgeois public sphere of vernacular letters. Absent any traditional poetic persona for such a bourgeois poet—indeed, as Guillory observes, “the only identification of the bourgeoisie as yet available to the bourgeois in general is precisely a lack of stable selfidentification”—the pastoral mode of Gray’s “Elegy” positions this poet “as an aristocrat in relation to the peasantry, and as a peasant in relation to the ruling class.”47 Similarly, the speaker at the end of Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” images his own dispossession with respect to the ruling class, and his ambivalence about inviting “sweet Poetry” to “strike for honest fame” in the marketplace of vernacular public letters, through his identification with the village’s defaced pastoral.48 Against its British models, as we have already seen, Dwight’s Greenfield Hill repeatedly asserts itself as the model poem of a nation without either peasantry or aristocracy. Rural Connecticut’s ruling social condition is that of “sweet Competence,” from the perspective of which Dwight can denounce both “foul luxury” and “poverty’s eternal bar,” fixed against the aspirations of the poor in Europe and Britain (Greenfield Hill, II.157, 151, 154). No flowers that blushingly waste their sweetness on the desert air in Dwight’s Connecticut: Greenfield Hill, he implies, offers a real pastoral of “middling” society against which Gray’s pastoral elegy appears as the literary convention it is, bourgeois poets dressed as aristocrats dressed as peasants. And yet Gray’s lines, with their anxieties about ambition and muteness, reappear in Greenfield Hill when Dwight’s speaker muses on the “human dust” that may lie beneath his feet as he composes the history of the Pequod war: Here sleeps, perchance, among the vulgar dead, Some Chief, the lofty theme of Indian rhyme, Who lov’d Ambition’s cloudy steep to climb, And smil’d, deaths, dangers, rivals to engage; Who rous’d his followers’ souls to deeds sublime,

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Kindling to furnace heat vindictive rage, And soar’d Cæsarean heights, the Phoenix of his age. (IV.102–8) Dwight’s imagined dead Indian chief differs from Gray’s peasants in that he actually wielded the “rod of empire” during his own lifetime and among his own people. The chief’s “vindictive rage,” unlike the famously repressed “noble rage” of Gray’s peasants,49 found full expression in his deeds and was memorialized in the unwritten song of Indian epics, a rather different “unlettered Muse” than the one that scrawls “uncouth rhymes” on the “frail memorials” of the poor in Gray’s poem. Gray’s encounter between literate poet and the illiterate poor becomes in Greenfield Hill the encounter between two civilizations, one with a lofty but lost oral epic tradition, the other literate—fully literate, Dwight hopes, from top to bottom. As William Dowling observes, Greenfield Hill’s echo of Gray’s “Elegy” allows Dwight to “reimagine Indian civilization within the categories of European historical experience, making it a story of unrecorded wars, unmedaled heroes, unwritten epics”; thus Greenfield Hill integrates the Pequods into the Enlightenment world-historical grand narrative of the rise and fall of civilizations.50 But the echo of Gray’s “Elegy” also points to a problem of poetic ambition for Dwight in the New World: What is the relationship between the unwritten epic of the Indian chief’s ambition, memorialized (and forgotten) in lofty oral rhyme, and the possibility of ambitious poetry in the United States? One aspect of this problem in Greenfield Hill concerns the social location of ambitious poetry in the pastoral world of “sweet Competence”: between the half-hollow classical pretensions of the village academy and the democratic practicality of the language taught in the villages’ “Inferior Schools,” where is an uninvidious literary distinction within the American vernacular, a trustworthy elevation of the common tongue, to be found? Another, and by now critically more familiar, aspect of this problem is moral and political—as well as a problem in literary genre. Dwight is well aware, as Sigourney will be after him, that a civilization has been destroyed in the making of Greenfield Hill, the Indian chief’s warlike ambition defeated by European “Avarice” lusting after “boundless breadth of land” (IV.309).51 Dwight’s allusion to Gray’s “Elegy” only half buries “a nation’s doom,” as he later calls the destruction of the Pequods (IV.389), under the elegy’s rhetoric of individual human mortality. This moral and political problem plays itself out in Dwight’s literary oeuvre as the relationship between literary genres, epic and georgic. In its broad outlines, Dwight’s poetic career reverses the classical Virgilian

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sequence of genres, proceeding from epic in The Conquest of Canaan (1785) to georgic in Greenfield Hill. The georgic mode of Greenfield Hill self-consciously repudiates epic poetry as the model of nationmaking poetry, most energetically in part III, “The Burning of Fairfield,” a sort of anti-Iliad about the British destruction of a Connecticut town during the Revolutionary War that denounces epic’s glorification of war: Whose name rolls down, from age to age? Whose splendours light th’ Historic page? Who wakes th’ inrapt Mæonian song? Who prompts the universal tongue? The world’s great guardian, genius, god? The Man of spoil, the Man of blood. (III.475–80) But Greenfield Hill’s georgic mode never entirely rids itself of the epic of conquest; instead, its georgic swallows epic up as one of its movements, in both “The Burning of Fairfield” and part IV, “The Destruction of the Pequods.”52 In counterpoint to “The Burning of Fairfield,” where Dwight casts Britain’s imperial troops as invading epic warriors, “The Destruction of the Pequod” allows that American soil also has its unwritten Homeric heroes in the Pequods, whose resistance to AngloAmerican avarice for land Dwight in the end must partly honor. Dwight thus incorporates into Greenfield Hill both the moral urgency of his Christian denunciation of epic and an elegy for epic itself, as personified by the Pequods, to whom he offers the humble tribute of this rhyme. Your gallant deeds, in Greece, or haughty Rome, By Maro sung, or Homer’s harp sublime, Had charm’d the world’s wide round, and triumph’d over time. (IV.392–96) The subjunctive tense of this parting tribute to the Pequods condenses both the unwritten status of the Indian’s “lofty rhyme” and Dwight’s own ambivalent parting from epic as the generic model for the American long poem. Sigourney fully inherited Dwight’s moral dismay over the treatment of Native Americans in the founding of the American nation, as well as Dwight’s allied generic dilemma over the expression of poetic ambition in the American vernacular—with the added qualification of attempting ambitious poetry as a woman poet. Before publishing “Connecticut River,” she, like Dwight, had made her own unsuccessful attempt at epic, in her Traits of the Aborigines of North America (1822).53 And

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again like Dwight, Sigourney turned away from epic and back toward village pastoral as her model for American “classic song” in “Connecticut River.” In Greenfield Hill, Dwight claims American georgic as the proper American national genre of poetic ambition by the double gesture of denouncing the bloody epics of the Old World and elegiacally incorporating the unwritten aboriginal epic of the Pequods. Sigourney carries the generic logic of Dwight’s poem one step further and feminizes it: in “Connecticut River,” female domestic elegy ultimately swallows up the American georgic mode that both incorporated and rejected epic. The graveyard mise-en-sc`ene in Sigourney’s “Connecticut River” returns more directly than does Dwight’s Greenfield Hill to the overt question of Gray’s “Elegy”: the distribution of literacy, polite letters, and social mobility within the nation itself. And behind that general problem lurks, for Sigourney as for Gray and Dwight, the problem of the poet’s ambition. Sigourney asserts, in countering Gray and revising Dwight, not only that social mobility is genuinely possible for the “lowly” young “germs” of her Connecticut village but that ambition itself can be guiltless in the continuous social fabric of the Republican nation: Scorn not this lowly race, ye sons of pride, Their joys disparage, nor their hopes deride; From germs like these have mighty statesmen sprung, Of prudent counsel, and pursuasive [sic] tongue; Unblenching souls, who ruled the willing throng, Their well-braced nerves, by early labour strong; Inventive minds, a nation’s wealth that wrought, And white haired sages, sold to studious thought, Chiefs whose bold step the field of battle trod, And holy men, who fed the flock of God. (15) The American Revolution, unlike the British, Sigourney implies, produced no Cromwell who waded to rule through his countrymen’s blood. Not only does the path to rule lie open for those of the village’s “lowly race” who excel in what Dwight calls the “uninvidious strife” (II.175) of effortful self-improvement, but republican rule itself lies in the consent of “the willing throng.” Rather than narrate that road out of the village, however, Sigourney turns her poem’s gaze at this point to the churchyard where chiefs and heroes lie buried—as if to say, in fundamental agreement with Gray’s “Elegy,” that even the new Republic’s paths of glory lead but to the grave. By doing so, she effectively buries in the churchyard the historical

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fact that Dwight’s Greenfield Hill more vividly remembers, that Connecticut waded in Pequod blood to plant the Anglo-American village. Here, ’mid the graves by time so sacred made, The poor, lost Indian slumbers in the shade;— He, whose canoe with arrowy swiftness clave In ancient days yon pure, cerulean wave; Son of that Spirit, whom in storms he traced, Through darkness followed—and in death embraced, He sleeps an outlaw ’mid his forfeit land, And grasps the arrow in his mouldered hand. Here, too, our patriot sires with honour rest, In Freedom’s cause who bared the valiant breast;— Sprung from their half-drawn furrow, as the cry Of threatened Liberty went thrilling by, Looked to their God—and reared in bulwark round, Breasts free from guile, and hands with toil embrowned, And bade a monarch’s thousand banners yield, Firm at the plough and glorious in the field, Lo! here they rest, who every danger braved, Unmarked, untrophied, ’mid the soil they saved. (15–16) Sigourney acknowledges that the “poor, lost Indian” mouldering in the village churchyard was dispossessed of his own land, but the churchyard’s mute juxtaposition of graves, repeated in her “Connecticut River” as the simple juxtaposition of Indian with Revolutionary soldiers, refuses to narrate any connection between the Indian’s “forfeit land” and the “soil” the soldiers “saved.” The half-buried burden of these lines, next to their precursors in Dwight, Gray, and Goldsmith, is where to locate the ambition not only of American poetry generally but of the woman poet in America specifically. Julie Ellison has argued of eighteenth-century British literature that its “fascination with the Native American ‘death song’ fused the lyric mode with the figure of the ‘vanishing Indian’ ” (Cato’s Tears, 98). Sigourney’s nineteenth-century American poem builds on this AngloAmerican genre by fusing (under Gray’s graveyard aegis) the vanishing Indian with the Revolutionary forefather. Unlike Dwight, who stresses the contrast between his unlettered Pequods and the literate civilization he represents, Sigourney presses both the Indian warrior sleeping “in the shade” and the village’s Revolutionary soldiers resting “untrophied” in the village churchyard into something approaching the condition of Gray’s “mute inglorious Milton,” unknown to fame. What finally

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emerges from this churchyard, by the end of “Connecticut River,” is a “classic” American literary language—teachable in the village’s common school and given an imaginary national and territorial antiquity, over and against its British models, by the mute dust of the Indian— whose natural condition is elegy and whose natural speaker is a woman. Death aside, the only way out of the village that “Connecticut River” is prepared to narrate is emigration, “roll[ing] its ceaseless tides / On western wilds” (16). Unlike Dwight, who insists that no mourning attends these further westward explorations,”54 Sigourney’s nineteenthcentury sensibility rejoins Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village” in stressing the emotional loss consequent to this displacement and the terrors, real and imagined, of the West’s “serpent-haunted shore” and “unshorn forests.” Westward emigration in Sigourney’s poem does not devastate the village left behind, as it does Goldsmith’s village of Auburn, but it does leave a residue of sorrow in the emigrant that women, Sigourney implies, are best equipped to give voice to. In the conclusion of “Connecticut River,” it is the mother who survives to sing the village she lost: . . . the sad mother, ’mid her children’s mirth Paints with fond tears a parent’s distant hearth, Or cheats her rustic babes with tender tales Of thee, blest River! and thy velvet vales; Her native cot, where luscious berries swell, The village school, and sabbath’s tuneful bell, And smiles to see the infant soul expand With proud devotion for that fatherland. (16) The “sad mother” passes on to her children the lost prospect she has internalized, thus transmuting the “classic song” of “Connecticut River” into a fireside elegy of displacement. As in Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village” and Gray’s “Elegy,” what is displaced here ultimately seems at least as much the ambition of the poet—in Sigourney’s case, specifically the American woman poet—as the inhabitants of the village. What returns from this displacement in Sigourney’s poem is an expanded sense of the United States as a continental nation, a fatherland united by the vernacular literary mother tongue. The generic and national plot of “Connecticut River” internalizes the eighteenth-century prospect poem as antebellum domestic elegy. It thus performs the relationship among poetic genres that I earlier suggested was essential to understanding Lydia Sigourney’s career and oeuvre as a changing whole. Nina Baym’s suggestion that we “think of [Sigourney’s]

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elegiac verse as another, individualized form of history writing” (“Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” 80–81) might be even more helpful, especially with respect to Sigourney’s work after the 1820s, if phrased in reverse: what remains of history writing in Sigourney’s later writings is a generalized form of elegy. Nowhere does Sigourney make the pathos-ridden reversibility of these propositions more obvious, or more obviously connected to her keen sense of her own changing value on the literary marketplace, than in her late Lucy Howard’s Journal (1857). One part fiction, roughly, to three parts autobiography, Lucy Howard’s Journal purports to be the journal kept by a young girl (who shares the initials of her middle name with Lydia Huntley Sigourney) from the age of ten through her death in giving birth to twins on the western frontier. Lucy Howard’s Journal presents us with the growth of a poet’s mind, but a mute inglorious poet, at least within the book’s fictional frame; Lucy Howard apparently never aspires to publish the poetry that she confides to her journal. In effect, Lucy Howard’s Journal is a compendium fictionalizing how the various genres of Sigourney’s poetry emerged out of the social relations and “inner habitudes of the last half century,” as Sigourney puts it in her preface.55 Writing begins, for ten-year-old Lucy Howard, with her schoolmistress’s command that “we must all keep journals,” even though Lucy “can’t for my life see” anything “worth writing down” about her life (5). Poetry likewise begins at the command of the schoolmistress, as a na¨ıve rhymed reflection on the social relations of the school: My teacher says “No day without a line.” I wish to keep her rule While I am in school; So here is mine. (6) This half-rebellious submission to the teacher’s requirements, however, generates reflection in retrospect—“I hope I did not write unkindly yesterday”—and, with it, Lucy’s dawning sense of interiority, hers and that of others: “An old lady used to say, ‘When you complain of things around, most likely something goes wrong within.’ I’ll try to carry a sunbeam in my heart to school to-day, and see what that will do” (7). Sent to what Lucy calls “a man’s school” for more ambitious learning (as Sigourney was herself; see her ambivalent description of the experience in Letters of Life, 50–51), Lucy not only survives the school’s yearend public examinations, of which “the hardest part . . . was to rise and read our own compositions” (53), but humbly takes the first prize in

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them (59–60). Yet her public distinction becomes her undoing, when neighbors suggest to her mother that Lucy has had all the schooling she needs: “They say I am a good scholar in French and in Latin, in Algebra, History, and all the common branches, and that there’s no more for me to learn. . . . I wonder if this does not come from getting the medal. I’d rather never have had it, nor any of my other prizes” (61). After reconciling herself to the change, and duly learning both the pleasures of charity and how to cook a beef hock down to a nourishing soup (recipe included, 71), Lucy is restored to poetry by finding that both classical learning and the real, immediate stuff of history may be found at home. Her grandfather, a Revolutionary War veteran, concerned “lest I should forget what I had acquired at school, especially the languages” (72), listens to her translations of Virgil, while she ponders his pacific preference for Virgil’s georgics over the Æneid despite his military experience. Lucy then returns to original poetic composition via a historical meditation on the Norman conquerors, to whom she prefers the good Saxon kings (73), and then by authoring a New Year’s song (79). Having rehearsed in a few pages the ideal ancestry of Anglo-American Protestant culture, so to speak—ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny—Lucy seems at last to have synthesized home and school, learning and her own poetic voice. That voice owns various registers: Lucy can versify recipes for lemon jelly and custard for her schoolmate Mary Ann (87–88) as easily as a hymn in honor of Washington’s birthday to present to her grandfather (110–11) or a learned reflection on a Cyclamen persicum plant, the gift of a friend (218–20) or a philosophical dialogue written for two boys, prot´eg´es of her fianc´e and eventual husband Henry, “to speak at their approaching school exhibition” (226–28). If the professional author Lydia Sigourney represented her Muse as a “woman of all work” in Parnassus (Letters of Life, 376), Lucy Howard’s Journal naturalizes that professional identity by representing it as the equivalent of Lucy’s unpublished poetry, spun out of the manifold relations of her everyday life.56 “His applause is more than fame,” Lucy says when her philosophical dialogue wins Henry’s approval; the professional author Lydia Huntley Sigourney, by contrast, could not settle for Charles Sigourney’s private applause. That is the first major departure from the facts of Lydia Sigourney’s own biography in Lucy Howard’s Journal; the second is Lucy’s emigration west. Charles Sigourney, when his hardware and banking business got into trouble, stayed in Hartford; Lucy’s Henry picks up his family and moves to Ohio, where Lucy adopts a young Indian woman into her family, becomes pregnant with twins, and dies giving birth to them. In emigrating westward, Lucy fulfills Sigourney’s picture of the young

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mother at the end of “Connecticut River,” who preserves in her family’s displacement the memory of the village left behind. In dying, Lucy takes that picture one step further: now the unpublished domestic female poetess joins the “poor, lost Indian” and the Revolutionary fathers as one more mute inglorious Milton in the graveyard of Sigourney’s national elegy. Her author somehow survives her, stepping forward in the final pages: “She whose intimacy we have so long shared through these pages thought not to write in her journal, ‘These are my last lines.’ Prescience was not hers” (342). But the prescience was, in some sense, Sigourney’s. Although these would by no means be her last published lines, Sigourney was entirely self-conscious in Lucy Howard’s Journal about having survived herself—having survived her own literary moment. “The rush of progress in our native clime,” she writes in her preface, “is without parallel in its transforming and effacing power.” It is, Sigourney acknowledges, on the verge of effacing the social matrix in which she herself came to be: “The inner habitudes of the last half century are already becoming matters of tradition. Yet, as far as they are mingled with the domestic nurture of females, it is well to preserve their semblance; for if obsolete as precedents, they will become points of historic interest.” Having made a literary career of elegizing history, Sigourney in Lucy Howard’s Journal turns full circle by offering up her own literary supersession as history: Lydia Sigourney’s 1857 elegy for mute inglorious Lucy Howard becomes the ideal-typical history of Lydia Sigourney, famous poetess on the verge of becoming the matter of tradition.

CHAPTER THREE

Poetry, Slavery, Personification: Maria Lowell’s “Africa”

The didactic energies of the domestic-tutelary complex were not always confined to the school and the home for their expression. For many antebellum American women writers, the abolition movement and the post–Civil War struggles of Reconstruction expanded their sense of authorial possibility. From radically different social positions, Maria Lowell and Frances E. W. Harper seized this historical moment to write politically engaged poetry that mediated between pedagogical rhetorics and more autonomous aesthetics, between school culture and the emergent world of high culture. Among the purchasable goods offered to Boston’s philanthropic elite during the Christmas holiday season of 1849 was the latest number of the Liberty Bell, in which Maria Lowell’s poem “Africa” first appeared. The Liberty Bell, as Karen Sanchez-Eppler ´ observes, was “the most substantial and longest-lived” instance of what Lee Chambers-Schiller calls a “new form of antislavery literature,” the familiar annual gift book newly adopted to the ends of political controversy. Edited by Maria Weston Chapman, produced and sold in conjunction with the holidaytime fair annually sponsored by the Boston Female Antislavery Society from 1839 to 1858, the Liberty Bell made a sizable contribution every year to the organization’s coffers.1 Featuring contributions by wellknown authors both American and British (among them Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Martineau), along with writers of more local reputation, the Liberty Bell showed its readers abolitionism’s most genteel, literary, Anglo-American, aestheticized face.2 This face was remarkably consonant with the other luxury items, many of them imported, surrounding the Liberty Bell at the fair: a “ ‘varied and beautiful’ collection of goods,” as an advertising circular put it, comprising “ ‘Caps and Fanchons from the most fashionable Megasins of Paris,’ ‘Dresden China of the time of Louis Quinze,’ Chinese envelope boxes, Scotch shawls, silk and satin aprons, lace cuffs and collars, and so on”—set out alongside humbler native pedagogical productions like homemade jam and samplers stitched by schoolgirls.3 The 1849 fair displayed its imported and native luxury goods within a resoundingly American nationalist setting; for the first time in the fair’s history, the

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“varied and beautiful” elite consumer goods of the 1849 bazaar were offered up for sale in Boston’s Faneuil Hall (Hansen, 127), the hallowed civic meeting place of the American Revolution. It was little more than a decade earlier, during the antiabolitionists riots of 1835, that conservative Bostonians had met in Faneuil Hall to denounce visiting British abolitionist George Thompson as a dangerous foreign “agitator.” By 1849, Maria Chapman had brought the agitation indoors and fully incorporated it into the holiday cycle of Boston’s liberal elite. The poetry published in the Liberty Bell doubtless did its part in normalizing abolition for Boston’s literary culture. Much more so than the fiction and prose published in the Liberty Bell, poetry enjoyed license to wander from thematic engagement with the problem of slavery—enjoyed license to rely, in Sanchez-Eppler’s ´ words, on “aesthetic, stylistic, and formal mechanisms” rather than “thematic political content” for its ideological significance (“Touching Liberty,” 12). James Russell Lowell’s contribution to the 1849 number in which his wife’s “Africa” appeared, for example, was a medievalist ballad, “The Burial of Theobald.” Absent any overt antislavery message, the poem’s monkish plot and setting would have connoted, rather than denoted, a variety of despotisms for New England readers accustomed to linking “Romanish iniquities” with those of the slaveholding South.4 Similar freedom to connote rather than denote is granted to poetry in the 1847 Liberty Bell’s publication of “Paul Flemming’s Sonnet to Himself.” As the poem’s headnote by Elizabeth Follen explains, “This sonnet was translated by Dr. Charles Follen for his lectures on the romantic literature of the Germans. It seemed to me that these circumstances, added to the character of the poem itself, would make it acceptable to readers of the Liberty Bell.” The “character of the poem itself” is abstract self-exhortation to bravery and perseverance; the sonnet concludes, “If thou has learned indeed to will and to obey / Thyself—the vast world must own thy righteous sway.” Sonnet and headnote together suggest how poetry published in the Liberty Bell could exemplify abolitionism’s didactic authority and self-disciplined individualism in their most abstracted, sheerly formal or aesthetic mode: poem and teaching have an autonomous generic authority not tied to any specific thematic object. This was a generic authority not seized equally by men and women writing for the Liberty Bell, the pages of which dislose a striking division of abolitionist labor by gender and genre. In Sanchez-Eppler’s ´ survey, men account for “two-thirds of the more than two hundred contributors to the Liberty Bell,” but only two men contribute fiction; the rest contribute “argumentative pieces and poetry” (152 n. 27). Women, too, contributed argumentative prose and poetry, but their gendermarked genre was fiction. This did not make Maria Lowell unique or

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even strikingly unusual as a woman poet writing for the Liberty Bell, but it does suggest that she and other women who contributed poetry may well have understood their work as generically transgressing gendered ascriptions of literary value, of elite aesthetic versus popular significance, in ways that women’s fiction in the Liberty Bell perhaps did not. At the same time, however, the Liberty Bell’s generic heterogeneity, as well as its avowed political purpose, ensured that women poets’ sometime forays into normatively masculine elite poetic aesthetics in its pages would keep close company with more popular and conventionally feminine aesthetics. The poetry women wrote and published in the Liberty Bell thus occupied an especially complex intersection between “aesthetic mechanisms” (in Sanchez-Eppler’s ´ words) and ideological significance, between elite and popular forms of significance, and in the gendering of genre. As the wife of poet James Russell Lowell, participant in various Cambridge literary circles, including Margaret Fuller’s salon, and frequent contributor of poetry to the Liberty Bell, Maria Lowell lived this intersection intimately. As the author of “Africa”— with its stylized Egyptian setting realized through high British and American romantic poetic antecedents, as well as the humbler domestic materials of educational rhetoric and popular anthropological controversy—she wrote this intersection into remarkably ambitious poetry. To begin with elite cultural significance: my reading of “Africa” finds it, among other things, a response to and entry in a line of high and notso-high canonical poems of romantic titanism—poems about the supersessions of one civilization by another, of history, ruin, and sometimes recovery. In these poems fallen gods (of many kinds), inert monuments, and decaying objects are conjured to speak the story of their fall and sometimes to anticipate their resurrection. For the purposes of this chapter, the member of this romantic line nearest to Lowell’s poem will be Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Sphinx” (published first in the Dial of 1841 and again in Emerson’s Poems of 1847), but the line also canonically includes Keats’s Hyperion poems and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and (in more difficult ways) “Prometheus Unbound” and The Triumph of Life. Generically derived from but frequently critical of the Enlightenment progress poem, these poems concern themselves, as Alan J. Bewell has written of Keats’s Hyperion, with “the historical vicissitudes of sculpture, the losses of meaning that attend political and cultural change,” and in doing so explore the possibility of “rewrit[ing] political revolution in non-violent, aesthetic terms.”5 In the years 1840– 49, some of these poems had been brought conspicuously before readers of British romanticism in the United States: Mary Shelley’s 1839 edition of Percy Shelley’s poetry, followed by the first complete Ameri-

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can edition in 1846, and the appearance in the United States of Richard Monckton Milnes’s 1848 edition of Keats’s life and letters, excited a minor spate of American reflections on what many contemporary observers themselves understood and framed as the canonical moment of the British romantic poets as a school. “It is now generally understood,” trumpeted an essayist in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review in 1849, “that sarcasm directed against the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, is but the expiring echo of a departed criticism. . . . That the works of these writers constitute an era in our literary history we cannot doubt; that they are the prophecy and in part the realization of a higher species of poetry than has yet been written, we have as little doubt.”6 The years 1848–49 were marked, of course, by other than canonical literary and aesthetic versions of political revolution. The timing of British romanticism’s canonical reception in the United States may have much to do with how the “historical vicissitudes of sculpture” as well as the aesthetics of revolutionary change played themselves out differently when translated to antebellum American contexts. Public revulsion from the radicalism and violence of the European revolutions, after fairly widespread initial enthusiasm, threw many Americans back on contrasts already received in the 1830s and 1840s, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, “between American and European revolution, as between gradual progress and recurrent violence.”7 Even before the events of 1848–49, these political contrasts figured themselves aesthetically through distinctively American revisions of romantic titanism. In both political and literary terms, the American Revolution, unlike those of the Old World, was imagined not to be built upon ruins; “American literature,” as Hawthorne had written in 1844, was yet to be ‘hew[n] . . . out of the unwrought granite of our intellectual quarries.”8 Antebellum American artists and writers who “inherited the European view of mountain titanism, the Romantic Sublime, . . . turned it into what they termed ‘titanism for democratic purposes’ ” (Bercovitch, 286), a nationalist celebration of America’s “unwrought granite” as history’s best hope for a final redemption, over and against the interminably violent repetitions of European revolutions. The American mountain as natural sculpture and central icon of democratic titanism, unlike the historically compromised sculptural immortals of second-generation British romantic titanism, bodied forth the New World as a “new beginning that promised as well, by a quickening of time, a millennial ending.”9 Emerson’s exemplary “Monadnoc” (printed with “The Sphinx” in the Poems of 1847) presides over a New World in which the mountain’s rocks are “light,” its “cone” is imminently ready to “spin,” and America’s pyramids are ready to break into dance as soon as the music

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of time’s procession reaches them: America’s natural monuments, unlike those of the Old World, will sublimate themselves directly into history’s idea without passing through an intermediate stage of ruin.10 American democratic titanism, as Bercovitch’s essay on Melville’s Pierre explores at length, inspired critical as well as celebratory rehearsals among authors of the American Renaissance—Maria Lowell among them. Romantic titanism in both its American versions, however, is only one avatar of a less strictly poetic and elite, indeed broadly pedagogical, political, and philosophical nineteenth-century genre that might be called “national personification” or “national prosopopoeia”—a genre that gives a face and speaking voice to a historical abstraction of a nation or a people. While romantic literary titanism provides the setting of Maria Lowell’s “Africa,” the broader genre of national personification provides the basic rhetorical premise of Lowell’s poem, along with many other antislavery poems based on personification and apostrophe. Indeed, one reason for personification’s central usefulness, even necessity, to abolitionist writers may well be personification’s centrality in the deep structure of an ideal-typical antebellum American scene of instruction in the meanings of history. When Lydia Maria Child, for example, speaking as “Aunt Maria” to her little nephew “Robert” in her anonymously published Evenings in New England (1824), sets about clarifying for young Robert the meanings and application of his rather obscure lesson in “personification” out of Doctor Blair’s rhetoric, her examples lead him away from Blair’s typically eighteenth-century concerns out of moral philosophy (in which personification, as Robert repeats doubtfully, “means speaking of charity and justice, and such sort of things, as if they were people”) and toward personifying “parts of the world”—Asia, Africa, Europe, South America and North America—as human actors of history.11 Aunt Maria’s lesson begins with an imagined picture of someone “seated on a cushion, smoking a long pipe and adorned with a turban all glittering with jewels.” “It must mean Turkey or Persia,” Robert replies—with only too much specificity, as it turns out, since his aunt in correcting him points out that “the manners of the eastern nations are so similar, that it may answer for the whole of Asia.” And so on, the imaginary frieze culminating in a “young female, clothed in a robe all covered with stripes and stars,” whom Robert has no trouble identifying as “my own North America”—a formulation that rhetorically annexes Canada (and redeems some of the previous decade’s humiliations in the War of 1812) by letting the American flag answer for the whole of North America.12 At lesson’s end, Robert thanks his aunt, telling her, “I shall never forget what personification means.” Coming as the very first les-

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son in Child’s book, “Personification” implicitly models both the instruction to follow and the student ideally intended to receive it. If young Robert is nominally educated in moral philosophy and rhetoric out of British textbooks, it is the domestic and feminized supplement to his formal education that drives home to him the specifically American world-historical significance of his schooling and that personifies him as the subject of this history.13 In the same year that Child anonymously published Evenings in New England, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then a disgruntled New England teacher of adolescent girls, confided to his journal a different but related scene of instruction. In Emerson’s case the instruction is (typically) self-administered rather than dialogical, part of his intensive course of reading in the years 1822–24, and the imagined scene of its imparting collapses the domestic into the industrial: recalling that “Pliny’s uncle had a slave read while he eat [sic],” Emerson imagines “the day may come when the scholar shall be provided with a Reading Steam Engine; when he shall say Presto—& it shall discourse eloquent history—& Stop Sesame & it shall hush to let him think.”14 Without the assistance of the steam engine, Emerson was making his way in 1824 through Jacques Bossuet’s Histoire Universelle. His labor of reading takes wing in an extended discourse of historical personification that directly follows the entry on the Reading Steam Engine, beginning with “the Spirit of Humanity” leaving “the arm-chair of its old age” for “the old mansion house of Asia, the playground of its childhood,” and concluding: Asia, Africa, Europe, old leprous & wicked, have run round the goal of centuries till we* are tired and they are ready to drop. But now a strong man has entered the race & is outstripping them all. Strong Man! youth & glory are with thee. ⬍T⬎As thou wouldst prosper forget not the hope of mankind. Trample not upon thy competitors though unworthy. Europe is thy ⬍mo⬎father—⬍support her Asia⬎ bear him on thy Atlantean shoulders. Asia, thy grandsire, regenerate him. Africa, their ancient abused ⬍slave⬎ bondman. Give him his freedom. *‘We’ means beings better than we [Emerson’s footnote].15 Emerson’s basic cast of historical characters and their historical positions relative to one another nearly duplicate Child’s. Next to Child’s domestic tutelage, however, Emerson’s autodidactic flight is immediately striking for the frank aggression with which it turns round upon and disfigures (as “leprous”) its initially “cherished” historical personifications. Aggression goes hand in hand with Emerson’s deliberate masculinizing of the personifications Child more traditionally employs as female; to judge from his cancellations, Emerson’s first impulse repro-

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duced the conventional female gendering, which he apparently revised in keeping with the passage’s governing metaphor of history as a footrace between men—its outcome, American democratic titanism. Although the “strong man” is never named directly as the United States, his identity is sufficiently indicated by his “Atlantean shoulders”: Emerson’s titanic epithet anchors the legend of Atlantis and the myth of Atlas on America’s eastward-looking Atlantic coast. Emerson’s journal entry, shaped though it so conspicuously is by his own masculine vocational crisis, implies some of the continuities between Child’s female and domestic (but quite public) middle-class scene of elementary instruction and more exclusive, usually masculine educational venues, formal and informal, that trafficked in the high-cultural personifications of early nineteenth-century philosophies of history. Emerson’s and Child’s various sources—highbrow and middling, British and French—for their common historical rhetoric underline the ways in which American democratic titanism and American historiographies of personification were partly imported, partly native antebellum growths. Nineteenth-century European idealist theories of history, as young Robert’s elders were imbibing them and adapting them to American contexts, famously read history itself in terms of a kind of ultimate personification—the struggle of particular civilizations, ultimately of the entire human race, to realize the freedom of absolute Spirit or Consciousness. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels caustically observed in The German Ideology, writing some two decades after Child’s lesson and Emerson’s journal entry, nineteenth-century idealist historiography granted its central terms—“to wit: ‘Self-Consciousness,’ ‘Criticism,’ ‘the Unique,’ etc.”—the status of “ ‘a person ranking with other persons.’ ”16 For Marx and Engels, the abstract historical personages created by Emerson’s alienated intellectual labor of armchair and imaginary steam engine correspond by inversion to the actual condition of the majority of real nineteenth-century human individuals who are rendered “abstract individuals” by their lack of control over the means of production. Nineteenth-century American readers were “particularly receptive,” as Henry Sussman has argued in accounting for Hegel’s American reception, to this idealist historiography of personification: “To the extent that the American nation saw itself as the realization of prior historical and cultural stages and as the amalgamation of existing populations,” the United States could see itself—and be seen by other nations—as a kind of supranational personification, a “meta-national” entity “already resulting from a historiographic meditation on nationality.”17 This is exactly the position the “strong man” holds in Emerson’s armchair meditation on the race for history and “North America” in Child’s rhetoric

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lesson. Child’s “young female” clothed in stripes and stars is found “occasionally looking back upon an Indian”; as Aunt Maria explains, America is now “mostly filled by Europeans, and we look back to the savage state as to what we have been.” America both cancels and preserves previous states and conditions of humankind. Child’s nineteenthcentury American supplement to Hugh Blair’s eighteenth-century rhetoric personifies young America in order to make young Americans into metanational subjects of history, a people whose citizenship, individual and collective, stems from “a historiographic meditation on nationality” and in whom the burdens of past nationalities will eventually be overcome. In Emerson’s vision, it is the democratic titan, America as young Atlas, who takes up and so brings an end to these burdens, finally sealing off the “leprous” metonymic series of Old World personifications. American democratic titanism is the mirror in which national personification sees itself and at last knows itself divine—or would if it were not for Emerson’s take-back footnote, which characteristically reopens a metonymic series (“ ‘We’ means beings better than we”) in just this position of metaphoric self-regard. In both European and American versions of the nineteenth-century grand narrative of historical personification, Africa and, most especially, Egypt held a pivotal place. Napoleon’s celebrated expedition to Egypt of 1798, the subsequent widespread dissemination of archaeological information about the ancient monuments, the discovery of the Rosetta stone by a French officer, and Champollion’s 1827 publication of his deciphering of the hieroglyphics sparked explosions of European and American speculation and debate, in both elite and middlebrow venues, over the origins of writing, mathematics, and architecture in Egypt; over the apparent conflict between Old Testament chronology and the monumental records of the ancient Egyptian dynasties; and, of course, over the race of the ancient Egyptians: Were they black Africans?18 Depending on who was looking and why, Euro-American observers positioned Egypt ambiguously between “Asia” and Greece, prehistory and written history, Enlightenment freedoms and “oriental” despotism.19 Hegel’s influential reading of Egyptian art in his Aesthetics (lectures that were posthumously compiled and published in 1835) codified and elevated these rich popular binarisms to the level of the philosophy of art by locating ancient Egyptians “at the threshold of the realm of freedom”— the threshold dramatically personified for Hegel in the figure of the Sphinx, in which “the human spirit tries to push itself forward” “out of the dull strength and power of the animal,” but “without coming to a perfect portrayal of its own freedom and animated shape.” For Hegel, the Sphinx was the very “symbol of the symbolic itself”: which is to say,

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“the symbolic” in the Aesthetics centers on personification, the moment when spirit, poised between the animal and the freedom of human animation, is caught in a monumental figure.20 And Hegel’s was only one in a chorus of voices reading the history of human civilizations generally, and Egypt particularly, in terms of an aestheticized thematics of freedom and unfreedom. Not surprisingly, these early nineteenth-century European intellectual skirmishes over the historical and aesthetic significance of Egypt in the grand narrative of world civilizations took on a special virulence in the antebellum United States, where debates over the race of the Egyptians could hardly fail to be conscripted directly into the national struggle over slavery. Some polemicists held that the ancient Egyptians were black but not the authors of their own civilization or contributors to later civilizations: according to antiabolitionist Josiah Priest, “the pyramids, which were built of hewn stone, was [sic] not the work of the woolly heads of Egypt.”21 Others saw “the tombs, the ruined temples, the gigantic pyramids of Pharaonic Egypt” as indeed the work of Egyptians who, for that very reason, could not possibly have had “woolly heads.”22 Egyptian civilization and its makers figured in every significant permutation of antebellum American racial thought (including speculations that the original inhabitants of the New World migrated there from Egypt),23 but most especially in what came at midcentury to be known as the “American school” of ethnology and its central theory of polygeny—the belief that human races were created distinct from one another rather than emerging over time from one set of ancestors. Spurred on by archaeological expeditions that plundered both Old and New World ruins for human remains, polygeny mounted a serious challenge to the dominance of eighteenth-century “monogenesis” during the 1840s and 1850s, the decades in which “the conclusions of scientists on the nature and extent of racial diversity came for the first time to play an important role in the discussion of black servitude.” Representing black Africans as an entirely separate species from white Europeans, polygeny enabled apologists for slavery “to retain their belief that all ‘men’—meaning now all members of the Caucasian ‘species’— were created equal.”24 Dignified as cutting-edge scientific inquiry, polygeny gained a hearing in Northern elite intellectual circles, including those of Boston antislavery intellectuals. By the time Maria Lowell published “Africa,” polygeny’s most eminent convert and spokesman, the Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz, had become a professor of biology at Harvard and a member of the Cambridge intellectual community in which she and James Russell Lowell participated. Agassiz’s main work on polygeny, a long article entitled “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races,” was in preparation when Lowell’s poem appeared.25

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Polygeny richly suited an American antebellum racial discourse preoccupied with “exterior marks of identity,”26 and ancient Egypt provided polygeny with its chief historical archive of exterior marks. Theorists of polygeny pointed triumphantly to visual representations of different human races on the Egyptian monuments as evidence that humankind had been racially divided from its earliest days, and when occasion required solved the ideological conundrum of the race of the ancient Egyptians tautologically, by declaring them a unique species unto themselves, neither black nor white nor Asian.27 In the United States, fascination with the ancient Egyptians from the late 1820s into the 1850s gradually shifted its focus from the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs to the deciphering of Egyptian physiognomies, the grand summa of which was physician and ethnologist Samuel George Morton’s Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), illustrated with ancient and modern Egyptian skulls from his own personal collection as well as drawings from the Egyptian monuments. Where earlier American elite and popular works on Egypt had reproduced row upon row of hieroglyphs as visual clues to the unfolding ancient mysteries, the “American school” of ethnography at midcentury reproduced row upon row of heads for inspection (figure 3.1). This was evidence that needed no Rosetta stone for its interpretation, nor occult reasoning into the nature of the sign; its “absolutely” clear insignia were presumed to be legible “at once” to viewers who needed only to call upon the “authority” of their own faith in racial difference. Examining the significance of the hieroglyphic discoveries for the elite writers of the American Renaissance, John Irwin concludes that hieroglyphs “represent the archetypal form of writing in which the outline of a body is rendered visibly present”; they were therefore “constantly employed as a symbol of that ideal condition in which the physical shape of writing is self-evidential.”28 By midcentury, however, it was racial physiognomy—the outline of a body indeed— rather than hieroglyphic writing that enjoyed the status of self-evidence in popular American Egyptology. The highest compliment two enthusiastic American amateurs of the field could pay the ancient Egyptians was not that they had invented writing or sculpture or astronomy but that the Egyptians were themselves ethnologists “even before the time of Moses.”29 These mid-nineteenth-century Egyptian heads spectacularly literalize the etymological meaning of “personification” and its Greek relative, “prosopopoeia”: making a person as making a face. They brutally insist on the implied moral of the rhetoric lesson Lydia Maria Child scripts for young Robert and his Aunt Maria: making face makes race. Personification is the rhetorical figure in which the idealist metaphysics of na-

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tional grand narratives meet and cross with the materialism of midcentury ethnology, and race is where personification comes home to be remembered. Race, then, is surely one reason that “the double strands of personification and apostrophe” are so central, as Wendy Dasler Johnson reminds us, to nineteenth-century American women’s—and not only women’s—poetry. As Johnson observes, apostrophe and personification do “the work of poetry in the eighteenth-century sentimental tradition” by “mak[ing] inanimate objects move the passions and haunt the conscience.”30 But when eighteenth-century moral philosophy turns into nineteenth-century nationalist historiography, when Robert’s rhetoric lesson gives over personifying “charity” and “justice” in order to personify nations and (as) races, the “objects” in question do not start as inanimate; they must first be made so. “Found” as ruins, in the condition of frieze or inscription, they may be read back into life, but life only of a particular kind. The deep trouble with the rhetorical genre of national personification—the deep problem of nineteenth-century idealist historiography and aesthetics in the service of reform movements, abolition perhaps most conspicuously—is the problem, as Marx and Engels put it in their critique of Hegel, of what happens to real historical individuals when the abstract concepts of idealist historiography are turned into “persons ranking with other persons.” In terms particularly of the rhetoric of abolitionist sentimental poetry, the problem is the writing over of animate persons in order to make the inanimate object that the poem only then rhetorically endows with life and personhood. Sentimental writing, in Philip Fisher’s influential formulation, “experiments with the extension of full and complete humanity to classes of figures from whom it has been socially withheld,” thus generating “novel objects of feeling” for sentimental readers.31 As Laura Wexler protests, however, the novel objects of sentimentalism were scarcely novel to themselves: “[T]he sentimental reader . . . is dangerous for his or her ‘novel’ object, precisely because he or she newly discovers in that object the possibility of a primary relation to itself that has been there all along, but must then be denied its history so that the discovery can be made.”32 Sentimental writing along with nineteenth-century idealist historiography depends on a rhetoric of personification that “discovers” its objects by inserting them into histories not their own, histories “speculatively distorted,” as Marx and Engels complain, “so that later history is made the goal of earlier history.”33 Rhetorically, these histories embed the figures of personification within those of prolepsis and metalepsis: so Lydia Maria Child’s North America as personified by a “young female” casts her eyes back on the Indian who proleptically figures what she, North America, has been.34 To the extent that it depends on personification for

Figure 3.1a From George R. Gliddon, Ancient Egypt (New York: J. Winchester, 1843).

Figure 3.1b and c From Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind; or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1854).

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its agents, and on prolepsis and metalepsis for its actions, sentimental poetry perhaps even more than sentimental fiction thus foregrounds the problem of the figure’s role in extending the effects of “complete humanity” to the objects it proffers to benevolent readers. Lowell’s “Africa” thoroughly explores these deep problems, and the many places of their cultural articulation. From its title forward, the poem’s basic premise is the plot of “national personification,” personification embodied in the romantic-titanic aesthetic register of monumental sculpture. “Africa” first describes in the third person, and then quotes the voice of, a colossal female Sphinx-like black stone figure, with a “great dusk face” and “massy lips,” presumably “Africa” herself.35 The figure tells of the rise and fall of Egyptian civilization, her first brood of “children,” and then of her search for her second generation, “my young barbarians,” her “Swart-skinned, crisp-haired” West African children, who vanished when the slave traders “took my free, / My careless ones, and the great sea / Blew back their endless sighs to me.” After making her lament, “Her great lips closed upon her moan,” Africa silently sits back “on her throne, / Rigid and black, as carved in stone,” waiting “Till the slow-moving hand of Fate / Shall lift me from my sunken state.” Like the Hyperion poems of Keats, Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Emerson’s “The Sphinx,” and the host of other works of romantic titanism written in the wake of Napoleon’s and other early nineteenthcentury plundering expeditions into antiquity, Lowell’s “Africa” begins and will end in the place of ruin, the twilight where superseded or expropriated gods, sunk into their historical condition as monuments, await the interpreters who may reanimate them. Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone . . . (Keats, Hyperion, ll. 1–4) I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies. . . . (Shelley, “Ozymandias,” ll. 1–4) The Sphinx is drowsy, Her wings are furled, Her ear is heavy,

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She broods on the world. “Who’ll tell me my secret, The ages have kept? I awaited the seer While they slumbered and slept;—” (Emerson, “The Sphinx,” ll. 1–8) She sat where the level sands Sent back the sky’s fierce glare; She folded her mighty hands, And waited with calm despair— While the red sun dropped down the streaming air. (Lowell, “Africa,” ll. 1–5)36 “Colossal, serious, and petrified,” to recall Hegel’s description of Egyptian monumental sculpture, these figures, as Alan Bewell says of Keats’s Hyperion, “occupy a threshold space somewhere between life and statuary.”37 In all these poems, even in Keats’s overtly Greek Hyperion (in which Thea’s face, rousing Saturn from his sleep, is “large as that of Memphian Sphinx, / Pedestal’d haply in a palace court, / When sages look’d to Egypt for their lore,” ll. 31–33), ancient culture at its most ancient, most monumental, most silent, and most obscure in its present survival is coded as Egyptian. Translated to Egypt, as it is in these poems, romantic titanism’s drama of cultural supersession rewrites the story of “a theogeny within a single culture” on an “east-west axis . . . as an international event, a confrontation between the gods of Europe and those of the Orient” (Bewell, 224). For Keats and Shelley, however, the confrontation staged on this east-west axis remains within the purview of the Old World: Europe and the Orient, facing one another across the Mediterranean. Writing from the United States, and after Champollion’s deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, Emerson in “The Sphinx” and Lowell in “Africa” extend the east-west axis of English romantic titanism still further, to America—Emerson optimistically, Lowell more skeptically; Emerson overtly, Lowell by implication. In Emerson’s “The Sphinx,” the translation from Old World to New in itself figures the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle into the nature of “man.” The land of the Sphinx, the palm, and the elephant, where the waves “Play glad with the breezes, / Old playfellows meet” (ll. 17–18, 25–28), Emerson’s Old World is a sensual Mediterranean paradise of natural harmony, in which only “man crouches and blushes / Absconds and conceals” (ll. 49–50). As Emerson had written in the conclusion of Nature, “the ruin or the blank” in this landscape truly lies in the eye of the beholder: “man” and the Sphinx, his double, are the only actual

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ruins crouched in this idyllic natural world. Characteristically, the riddle of Emerson’s Sphinx is the riddle of the eye, the struggle of the eye to cure itself.38 In the poem’s climactic moment, after the Poet has called out for “Rue, myrrh and cummin for the Sphinx, / Her muddy eyes to clear!” (ll. 107–8), the Sphinx tells the Poet that he himself is “the unanswered question, / Couldst see thy proper eye.” Like Nature in Nature, the Sphinx is “thoroughly mediate; she is made to serve”; she mediates the eye that otherwise could not see itself. When the Poet answers her riddle—that is, when both Poet and Sphinx acknowledge that he, “man,” is both question and answer39 —the Sphinx bites her “thick lip,” undoes her own personification as a threatening interlocutor, and metamorphoses from Old World sculptural ruin to welcoming New England nature: Uprose the merry Sphinx, And crouched no more in stone; She melted into purple cloud, She silvered in the moon; She spired into a yellow flame; She flowered in blossoms red; She flowed into a foaming wave: She stood Monadnoc’s head. (ll. 121–28) From the Sphinx to Mount Monadnoc: Emerson’s poem succinctly recapitulates the supersession of ruinous Old World titanism by American romantic titanism.40 Emerson’s optimistic American version of idealist historiography’s grand narrative of the westering of civilization frames Egypt as the land of the mind’s oppression, New England as where the Poet liberates the human mind from the (ultimately productive and fortunate) shame of its fall into history. Like more famous romantic revisions of Enlightenment progress narrative, “The Sphinx” works by disfiguring a figure—by what Orrin Wang, responding to Paul de Man’s “disfiguring” reading of monuments in The Triumph of Life, calls “reverse prosopopoeia.”41 Melting and flowering, the Sphinx loses her cohesion as an outline and so disarms the very prosopopoeia that constitutes her. But this poem’s happy myth of disfigurement takes up where Emerson’s earlier journal entry about “leprous” Asia and Africa leaves off, and like the journal entry it implicitly depends upon the prosopopoeia of race as well as sculptural romantic titanism—upon a personification that, as de Man and Wang both differently insist, “is always already disfigurement.”42 The “old Sphinx” signals her impending defeat and metamorphosis by biting her “thick lips,” with Emerson’s adjective—like the “massy lips” of Maria

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Lowell’s Africa—condensing both the conventionalized nineteenth-century aesthetic attributes of the Egyptian monumental sublime and the conventionalized physiognomy of Africans as a race. Emerson’s less aesthetically elevated adjective, however, signals that the historical depth and heft of Old World monuments hold no terrors for the American Poet, whose interpretive privilege with respect to Nature echoes that of white readers of African racial physiognomies. Both objects are selfevident, for their proper interpreter, in a double sense: self-evident in that embodiment and meaning coincide in them, and in that their ultimate referent is the selfsame “man” who reads them. To all appearances, Emerson takes for granted the racial prosopopoeia subtending his Poet’s access to mastery and so, by extension, the translation of civilization from East to West in “The Sphinx.” And this matter of racial prosopopoeia is precisely what Lowell’s “Africa,” in making an abolitionist poem partly out of Emerson’s own materials and situation, does not forget, indeed highlights. Repatriating Emerson’s Sphinx along the east-west axis of Emerson’s implied progress narrative, Lowell’s poem disputes the solution Emerson proposes to the riddle of history, asking who or what counts as “man”—the fundamental question, of course, in which the rhetorical figure of personification crossed with debates over the status of African slaves in the antebellum United States. Neither “drowsy” nor “muddy,” the “sleepless eye” of Lowell’s Africa looks into the setting sun, the direction of the progress narrative of the westering of civilization and poetry. Her relationship to that story seems at the poem’s outset fixed and done, overdetermined by her physical orientation, her corporeal figure, and her historical position, all of which are figured in the same interchangeable, overlapping terms, at once literal and metaphoric, of darkness and night: Her great dusk face no light From the sunset-glow could take; Dark as the primal night Ere over the earth God spake; It seemed for her a dawn could never break. (ll. 17–21) The poem’s opening prosopopoeia thus invites its readers to frame “Africa” in familiarly racist terms: untouched by civilization or salvation, this shape all darkness has never entered history; bypassed by the sunrise when civilization began in the East, she is incapable now of taking light from the West. The redundancy of the stanza’s raced epithets is the poem’s verbal counterpart to the self-evidence ascribed to racial physiognomies in

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popular midcentury America ethnology: anyone can see Africa’s darkness by her darkness. Her “great dusk face” is already a kind of reverse prosopopoeia in several senses: figuring darkness by darkness, Africa’s face holds that the only thing that substitutes for black is black; by its utter disconnection from specularity—its complete failure to mirror the setting sun’s light—Africa’s face withholds what de Man, writing of Shelley’s “shape all light,” calls “the self that comes into being in the moment of reflection,” the sun that, mirrored in the eye, “produces the illusion of the self as shape” (de Man, 55–56). The “level sands” reflect back “the sky’s fierce glare,” but the specular anti-self of Africa’s personification neither mirrors back the sun nor corresponds to the interlocutor, “man,” who finds himself in the Sphinx’s eye in Emerson’s poem. What follows, however, challenges the apparent self-evidence of this racial reverse prosopopoeia as both rhetorical and visual illusion. As in Emerson’s “The Sphinx,” the personified monument—Sphinx or Africa—changes state, crosses from statuary into life, when her lips move. She opened her massy lips And sighed with a dreary sound, As when by the sand’s eclipse Bewildered men are bound, And like a train of mourners, The columned winds sweep round. (ll. 22–27) The switch-point of her change of state, Africa’s “massy lips,” like the “thick lips” of Emerson’s Sphinx, mark her both in the conventionalized aesthetic register of the monument (massy as in monumentally carved) and in the popular rhetoric of racial physiognomy. Africa’s words will tell a different history from those of Emerson’s Sphinx, but even before her words take on outline, her “sigh” complicates the darkon-dark, figuratively circular and self-fulfilling, terms of her initial personification. Embedding simile within simile (“As when . . . And like”), the description of Africa’s sigh as sandstorm joins the opening stanza’s “sky’s fierce glare” to “the sand’s eclipse” by which “Bewildered men are bound.” Like Shelley’s vision in The Triumph of Light, Lowell’s poem opens in a “fierce glare” that is at the same time an “eclipse,” a replacement of light by light. The familiar tropes of enlightenment and their narratives of history, which personify Africa entirely by negation, will prove as untrustworthy here as they do in the famously difficult beginning of The Triumph of Life, where Shelley, like Lowell, imagines trains of bound, bewildered men moving in the wake of Enlightenment progress narratives. Further,

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the embedded similes of Africa’s “dreary” sigh ambiguously internalize the monumental decor of the opening stanzas, answering their “columns dun” with the “columned winds” imagined sweeping round the bewildered, sand-bound men. As Emerson would say, the ruin or blank lies in our own eye—or rather, in this case, in the ear. But whose ear? For Lowell’s Africa, it is more accurate to say that the ruin or blank lies in the absence of an interlocutor. The shift in register from visual to aural figuration, from the glare to the sigh, signals what will be a persistent counterpoint, in the body of the poem, between the light Africa’s face does or does not reflect back and the voice, emerging from her lips, that meets with no listeners. When Lowell’s Africa opens her lips to speak for herself, she tells her own version of an Enlightenment progress narrative, one opposed to but still drawing upon the terms of the “fierce glare” of the poem’s opening. Recalling, in Keats’s words, the time “When sages look’d to Egypt for their lore,” Lowell puts widely popular mid-nineteenth-century interpretations of ancient Egyptian civilization as “the great school of knowledge in the ancient world”43 into the mouth of “Africa” herself. She said: “My torch at fount of day I lit, now smouldering in decay; Through futures vast I grope my way. “I was sole queen the broad earth through: My children round my knees upgrew, And from my breast sucked Wisdom’s dew. “Day after day to them I hymned; Fresh knowledge still my song o’erbrimmed, Fresh knowledge, which no time had dimmed.” (ll. 28–36) Countering the disfiguring prosopopoeia of the opening stanzas, Lowell’s “Africa” elaborates her own personification as the mother of Egypt and, through Egypt, implicitly of all civilization; Egypt is the place to which she first brought the arts of mathematics, architecture, and painting. The building of the Egyptian pyramids, “where light and shade divided smile,” politely echoes the creation story in Genesis, where it is God who “divide[s] the light from the darkness” and at day’s end smiles at his work. Lowell’s allusion implies that the ancient Egyptians managed to build out of the creative godhead even without the benefit of special Christian revelation. Along with Hegel and other nineteenthcentury aesthetic historians, she reads the monuments of ancient Egyptian civilization in idealist aesthetic terms, as the world-historical real-

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ization of Thought’s “supreme commands,” but unlike him she does not see Egypt as a “defective” realization of “the freedom of spirit in itself.” Nor does Lowell’s “Africa” stand, like Emerson’s Sphinx, as a figure for the human mind’s fallenness, its enslavement to natural appearances and the cycles of time. In contrast to both Hegel and Emerson, Lowell’s ancient Egypt embodies an ideal harmony of aesthetic and intellectual knowledge, perception and cognition. This harmony finds expression in terms of the poem’s thematics of light and sound, which are reconciled throughout in mother Africa’s description of Egypt, but most conspicuously in Lowell’s version of the rearing of the statue of Memnon: “I sang of Numbers; soon they knew The spell they wrought, and on the blue Foretold the stars in order due;— “Of Music; and they fain would rear Something to tell its influence clear; Uprose my Memnon, with nice ear, “To wait upon the morning air, Until the sun rose from his lair Swifter, at greet of lutings rare.” (ll. 37–45) The original aesthetic condition of Memnon as a statue embodies a complete reciprocity or convertibility between light and sound, matter and form. Memnon’s monument, materialized out of the “influence” of music, responds to light with music; her Egyptian children thus “sing” her knowledge back to mother Africa, freely reflecting back to her the light she dispenses for them. In every way, then, the original aesthetic condition of the Memnon statue contrasts with the apparent present condition of “Africa” personified as monument and ruin, the face that reflects no light and the lament that finds no listeners. But by putting the story of ancient Egypt in Africa’s mouth, Lowell underscores that the present state of Africa is the outcome of historical process, not evidence of history’s absence. Lowell’s characterization of ancient Egypt implicitly rejects the Hegelian and Emersonian placement of Egyptian civilization at the aesthetic threshold between unfreedom and freedom. It equally rejects popular nineteenth-century Christian versions of this thematic, interpretations that cast Egypt as “a nation of slaves” and read “the colossal works” of Egyptian civilization as “mighty landmarks of her ancient servitude.”44 For Lowell, ancient Egypt is not the “Land of Bondage” in the sense of either popular Christian or idealist-aesthetic histories. By implication, the voice of “Africa” invites Lowell’s readers to locate the Land of Bondage elsewhere.

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Maria Lowell may have imbibed elements of her own idealist aesthetic reading of the Egyptian monuments from her participation in Margaret Fuller’s conversations of 1839–44, during which Fuller (according to Caroline Dall’s report) declared that the Sphinx “represents the development of a thought, founding itself upon the animal, until it grew upward into calm, placid power.” Reproducing the fundamental terms of Hegel’s reading of the Sphinx, in which “Out of the dull strength and power of the animal the human tries to push itself forward,” Fuller’s interpretation both sentimentalizes Hegel’s struggling Sphinx and literalizes the birth metaphor implicit in the human “push” to free itself: “It holds more meaning in its passive womb than talk will ever play the midwife to. It was the child of the Destructive Element and Feeling,—Typhon and Echidna,—the human heart experienced in misfortune touched by death. Thought rooted in the actual and developed by tenderness was rooted in this figure.”45 Lowell’s Africa, like Margaret Fuller’s Sphinx, is a mother of sorrows as well as civilization, a mother of civilization indeed because she is a mother of sorrows. But where the sufferings of Fuller’s Sphinx remain abstractly mythological, those of Lowell’s Africa will become historically specific, as she sets about not so much asking a riddle as trying to answer one: Where have all my children gone? Prompted by the west winds, who urge her to seek her “myriad children” in lands “Beyond the utmost verge of day,” mother Africa searches out the second generation of her “kingdom”: “I sought my young barbarians, where A mellower light broods on the air, And heavier blooms swing incense rare. “Swart-skinned, crisp-haired, they did not shun The burning arrows of the sun; Erect as palms stood every one. “I said: These shall live out their day In song and dance and endless play; The children of the world are they.” (ll. 79–87) Africa’s quest in Lowell’s poem rewrites the question of the Sphinx in Emerson’s poem, who wants to know what has happened to “turn her boy’s head,” to turn the joyful babe into the fallen, shame-ridden man who “crouches and blushes / Absconds and conceals.” Exorcising her maternal “shame” at having been unable to preserve her first children, the ancient Egyptians, Africa vows to protect her second family from the fate of her first by granting them a life of “song and dance and endless play,” without labor or toil. Spared both the orthodox Christian

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fall and the shameful self-consciousness of Emerson’s fallen “man,” Lowell’s black Africans stand as “erect” as the palms and sunbeams that rebuke fallen humankind in Emerson’s “Sphinx.” On one level, clearly, Lowell’s maternalized myth of civilizations and their succession directly reproduces stereotypes about black Africans as childish, stereotypes widely held by both abolitionists and their foes. But by presenting Egyptians and West Africans as children of the same personified mother Africa, Lowell rhetorically counters polygeny’s insistence not only that Egyptians and black Africans belonged to entirely separate species but that their coexistence on the same continent demonstrated that black Africans were wholly incapable of improvement by contact with “higher” civilizations.46 Moreover, the maternal myth reframes the differences between the two civilizations, Egypt and West Africa, in sentimental aesthetic terms that once again implicitly take issue with Hegelian historical aesthetics as well as popular racist assumptions about black Africans’ degeneracy or incapacity for civilization. If the Egyptians are sublime, their black successors are beautiful, and the beauty of their civilization is underwritten by mother Africa’s personified suffering: “Then throbbed my mother’s heart again, Then knew my pulses finer pain, Which wrought like fire within my brain”— (ll. 76–78) —a suffering that like fire creates as it destroys, that refines in both aesthetic and moral terms. The quest for her second brood of children animates and humanizes Lowell’s monumental Africa as the sight of fallen Saturn does Keats’s Thea, with her face “as large as Memphian Sphinx”: But O! how unlike marble was that face, How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One hand she pressed upon that aching spot Where beats the human heart, as if just there, Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain . . . (Hyperion, ll. 34–36) Thea epitomizes for Keats “the ‘sorrow’ of Egyptian sculpture, a sorrow that derives from its ability to incorporate within itself a premonition of its eclipse and loss of meaning” (Bewell, 227), and Lowell’s Africa similarly embodies an aesthetic of proleptic sorrow. Unlike Thea’s, however, Africa’s suffering, animating aesthetic of historical consciousness is

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not shared; her maternal wish for her second generation, unlike her first, is that they be spared what she already knows about the death and supersession of civilizations. They are not to ask of themselves in relation to the Egyptians what Hyperion does: “Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?” Clearly, though, Africa has “a listening fear in her regard” for her West African children, no less than Thea for Saturn in her grief, “As if calamity had but begun” (Hyperion, ll. 37–38), as indeed it has. Delivered from history by their generous mother, Lowell’s Africans are violently recaptured for history with the offstage entry of the slave traders, and Africa herself listens helplessly to their distant pain: “. . . They took my free, My careless ones, and the great sea Blew back their endless sighs to me: “With earthquake shudderings of the mould Would gape; I saw keen spears of gold Thrusting red hearts down, not yet cold, “But throbbing wildly; dreadful groans Stole upward through Earth’s ribbed stones, And crept along through all my zones.” (“Africa,” ll. 100–108) Raising the conventional grief of the slave mother bereft of her children— the staple of abolitionist literature—to titanic volume and stature, Lowell might be said to sentimentalize the romantic poets’ Egyptian monumental sublime at the same time that she sublimates abolitionist sentimentalism. But she also foregrounds the insecurity or reversibility of such sentimental personifications: the stone is invading Earth’s and Africa’s titanic breasts in the very act of their listening to her children’s groans. Africa’s suffering at her inability to respond to or rescue her children is what drives her retreat to her “desert bare” to escape her children’s groans, and finally what silences and immobilizes her by the poem’s end. When “her great lips close[ ] upon her moan,” the condition of sculpture closes over Africa’s animate voice as the glyph of racial prosopopoeia once again sets its seal upon her face. Historically awakened as both a subject and (for Lowell’s readers) a novel object of feeling, Africa returns at the poem’s end to the condition of monumental object, the personification that was “always already disfigurement” (Wang, 639). The action of Lowell’s “Africa” thus directly reverses—disfigures— that of Emerson’s “The Sphinx,” in which the Sphinx’s rising up from her immobility, her flowering from the condition of sculptural object

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into the condition of American titanic nature, signals Emerson’s confidence that the Old World’s shameful cycles of historical bondage can be brought to a close in America. “Africa” replies to this optimistic American metahistory by repatriating Emerson’s Sphinx and relocating her in histories of human suffering, histories in which the United States, rather than Egypt and Africa, figures as the Land of Bondage. Yet its generic premise in personification means that Lowell’s “Africa” cannot in the end represent individual slaves in the United States as active subjects of their own history. Like other poems of romantic sculptural titanism, “Africa” (to recall Alan Bewell’s words again) “rewrites revolution in non-violent, aesthetic terms,” in rhetoric as familiar as it may have been reassuring to readers of the 1849 Liberty Bell, for whom the European revolutions raised the domestic specter of slave rebellions. Like Lydia Maria Child’s sketch of Africa as a frightened man looking over his shoulder at an offshore ship in her essay “Personification,” Lowell’s “Africa” generically need not and cannot directly specify the human agents responsible for Africa’s suffering, nor those who might take responsibility for ending it. Personification calls out to personification: when Africa falls back into the stony condition of monumental sculpture, she awaits her reanimation by still another personification, “Fate.” The effectiveness of “Africa” as abolitionist rhetoric, of course, depended on its finding actual historical readers who might be able to recognize themselves in Fate’s personification. Maria Lowell’s elite white audience is presumably the chief object whom “Fate” is intended to animate, but the ending of “Africa” sternly withholds optimism in this respect. The rhetorical strategies of “Africa” point to those of many other abolitionist poems that work as exercises in failed or suspended national personification and apostrophe: the 1849 Liberty Bell alone featured, among others in this genre, John Bowring’s “Europe to America” (“europe shouts ‘Emancipation!’ / Will america reply?”) and Mary Carpenter’s “The Ocean Monarch and the Pearl,” in which the British ocean “conjures the Western waves to rise, and hinder their [the slave capturers’] inhuman purpose,” only to find that “The elements interfere not with the passions of man.” Prosopopoeia fails, these poems imply, when things may be more human than people who make human beings into things; its failure implicates those who employ the figure no less than those the figure both humanizes and objectifies, which is to say (with de Man) that prosopopoeia never stops because “we are its product rather than its agent.”47 As Barbara Johnson observes of personification and apostrophe in Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” the “speaker’s own sense of animation is precisely what is in doubt, so that he is in effect saying to the wind, ‘I will animate you

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so that you will animate, or reanimate, me.’ ”48 Minus a lyric “I” and absent the cheerful Poet whose apostrophe unriddles Emerson’s Sphinx, the effaced speaker of Lowell’s “Africa” seems even less confident than Shelley of her ability to master this metaleptic wonder of mutual (re)animation. The personhood of both black American slaves and white abolitionist audiences in the end is riddled by Lowell’s Sphinx. Maria Lowell and Ralph Waldo Emerson hardly needed to anticipate twentieth-century deconstructive allegories of history in order to find the great Sphinx—“the symbol of the symbolic itself,” as Hegel called her—a figure of disfigurement. Post-Napoleonic European and American travelers to Egypt were endlessly fascinated with the Sphinx’s “mutilated” face, its “thick” and “massy” lips coupled with its general impression of “placidity” and “benignity”—adjectives all repeated to the point of stereotype and beyond in travelers’ accounts. The nineteenthcentury Western observers who insisted on seeing the Sphinx’s features as “Caucasian,” who indeed supplied those features where they were missing (figure 3.2), seem to have been relatively few in number compared with those who luxuriated in the hermeneutic license afforded by the conjunction of the Sphinx’s “much mutilated” features and her taxonomically African lips; it was just this problematic conjunction that conjured up, for these observers, the Sphinx’s famous “bland repose and immutable serenity.”49 One name for this operation, of course, is fetishism (de Man would prefer to call it “the madness of words”): the Sphinx’s lavishly debated lips were the site in which racial difference, gender difference perhaps as well, and even the difference between life and death, life and sculpture, could be known and disavowed in the same gesture. (Napoleon’s follower Vivant Denon wrote that the Sphinx’s “mouth, the lips of which are thick, has a softness and delicacy of expression truly admirable; it seems real life and flesh.”)50 With the rest of her face shot off, according to persistent nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial legend, by French soldiers taking artillery practice, the lips of the Sphinx came to embody for Euro-American spectators both her “blackness as an exotic source of excitation and the denial of her blackness altogether.”51 Faced with her face, it seems next to impossible to decide whether or to what extent the real historical disfigurement of the Sphinx is either the product or the agent of the elite and popular rhetorics of prosopopoeia that have concerned me here.

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Figure 3.2a From Francis L. Hawks, D.D., LL.D., The Monuments of Egypt; or, Egypt a Witness for the Bible (New York: George P. Putnam, 1850). “I was awed before the Sphinx; for, mutilated as it is, there is something in that expression alike both Caucasian and great” (16).

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Figure 3.2b From J. M. Wainwright, D.D., The Land of Bondage; Its Ancient Monuments and Present Condition: Being the Journal of a Tour in Egypt (New York: D. Appleton, 1852). “Most persons have, probably, a general idea of the appearance of this monument. It stands to the east of the Pyramids, on a lower level, and has become imbedded in sand, with the exception of the head and the upper part of the body. Though the face is much mutilated, the general expression may still be gathered, and is one indicative of great placidity” (77–78).

CHAPTER FOUR

A Difference in the Vernacular: The Reconstruction Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

In her collected Poems of 1871, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper included a poem, “Truth,” that offered a brief allegory of the Northern victory in the Civil War and the ongoing labors of Reconstruction, labors to which Harper herself had directly contributed as a lecturer and educator traveling in the former slave states in the years immediately following the war.1 Like Maria Lowell’s “Africa,” Harper’s “Truth” enlists the rhetorical figure of personification or prosopopoeia in its pedagogical and political work. “Truth” personifies the fallen slave power as a monumental rock now fallen, like Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” into ruin, a Sphinx-like “mangled form” brought low by truth’s “tiny, humble seed”: A rock, for ages, stern and high, Stood frowning ’gainst the earth and sky, And never bowed his haughty crest When angry storms around him prest. Morn springing from the arms of night Had often bathed his brow with light, And kissed the shadows from his face With tender love and gentle grace. Day, pausing at the gates of rest, Smiled at him from the distant West, And from her throne the dark-browed Night Threw round his path her softest light. And yet he stood unmoved and proud, Nor love, nor wrath, his spirit bowed; He bared his brow to every blast And scorned the tempest as it passed. One day a tiny, humble seed— The keenest eye would hardly heed— Fell trembling at that stern rock’s base, And found a lowly hiding place.

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A ray of light, and drop of dew, Came with a message, kind and true; They told her of the world so bright, Its love, its joy, and rosy light, And lured her from her hiding place, To gaze upon earth’s glorious face. So, peeping timid from the ground, She grasped the ancient rock around, And climbing up with childish grace, She held him with a close embrace. Her clinging was a thing of dread; Where’er she touched a fissure spread, And he who’d breasted many a storm Stood frowning there, a mangled form; So Truth dropped in the silent earth, May seem a thing of little worth, Till, spreading round some mighty wrong, It saps its pillars proud and strong.2 Like so much of Harper’s poetry, “Truth” is both immediately lucid and deeply allusive, in multiple registers. Although no written record directly attests to such a performance, “Truth” could well have been among the poems Harper recited in the course of her lecture tours in the Reconstruction-era South; during these years Harper “accompanied her lectures with recitations of her poetry, which she also collected in volumes for publication and sold at the close of her lectures.”3 Whether they encountered the poem for the first time orally or in print, Harper’s contemporary audiences would surely have heard an echo of the familiar hymn “Rock of Ages” in the first line of “Truth”; and yet that echo would have been heard only to be qualified almost immediately. “Rock of Ages” derives its power from its metaphoric condensation of Old Testament law with New Testament mercy, the Mosaic rock cleft in the desert with the wounded body of Christ: Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in thee; Let the water and the blood From thy wounded side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and power. Harper’s “Truth” opens on an apparently similar image of a “rock, for ages, stern and high”: as Harper’s poem develops, however, this rock

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turns out to personify a satanic, idolatrous authority rather than a merciful Christ. “Proud” in self-regard, impervious to the softer blandishments of nature and natural feeling, this figure stands with the “haughty,” militant, unyielding, aristocratic bearing that white Southern mythmaking in the Reconstruction years wishfully ascribed to the Confederacy’s lost cause. Like Milton’s Satan, Harper’s scornful rock embodies a fallen but still dangerously alluring model of heroic authority and political leadership—a model morally fallen from the outset of “Truth,” and literally fallen by the poem’s end. Overcoming this satanic authority, dismantling its false allure and securing her audience’s assent to its fall, is the office of Harper’s tiny seed of “Truth.” Feminine and “humble” in contrast to the aggressively masculine pride of the rock in whose shadow it grows, Truth gratefully drinks of nature’s light and dew, those natural visitations scorned by the rock’s willful self-sufficiency. So far from wishing to grow away from the rock into self-sufficiency, Truth “embrace[s]” its seeming shelter; it is exactly the growing plant’s nonviolent embrace, however, that undoes the rock. In the gap between the fifth and the final verse paragraphs, the poem’s voice takes on for itself the sternness initially ascribed to the rock, without abandoning the poem’s metaphoric premise of Truth’s nonviolent, loving action: “Her clinging was a thing of dread, / Where’er she touched, a fissure spread.” And so, Harper’s political allegory implies, the slave power was first fissured from the body of the nation, then finally splintered. In Harper’s revisionist version of Civil War history, its downfall came not in the high heroic idiom of combat, heroic defiance, and force meeting force—the rock’s “haughty crest” more than meets its opposed “angry storms”— but through the growth and persistence in love of the humble. The rock that stood “for ages” but not of ages lies cleft not by its own voluntary submission to divine will but through that will’s working through the small seed of truth. The work of “truth” allegorized as the seed’s emergence in this poem is, of course, partly Harper’s own work as a lecturer and poet; what flourishes against the rock and ultimately brings it down is, in the traditional metaphor, the flower of eloquence emblematic of Harper’s own vocation. But the work of truth is not only Harper’s. The contemporary readers or live audiences who would have heard the eighteenth-century hymn behind Harper’s “Truth” might well have heard other, more contemporary echoes as well. The very title of Harper’s poem, in the years leading up to and following the Civil War, was not only a common noun but a famous proper name; Harper’s political allegory in “Truth” perhaps memorializes Sojourner Truth’s long career sapping the foundations of slavery. And like Harriet Jacobs, the seed in “Truth” finds a

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“hiding place” in the very face of the power it will ultimately bring down. However lively or faint such allusions to other African American women active against slavery may have been for Harper’s contemporaries, “Truth” clearly aims both to feminize and to demilitarize—without diminishing—the Northern victory in the Civil War.4 Like many of Harper’s prewar abolitionist poems, “Truth” trades in the familiar feminized discourse of sentiment, investing moral authority in the feminine, small, weak, and childlike clinging vine and ascribing moral and political effectivity to nonviolent love.5 And yet “Truth” at the same time eschews sentimentalism’s characteristic focus on reading the bodies of the feminine, the weak, and the oppressed for the signs of suffering, and in this respect the poem is typical, not exceptional, in Harper’s oeuvre. As Carla Peterson crucially points out, Harper’s poetry in general “relie[s] on sentimental discourse in order to call attention to the plight of the weak and the oppressed while refusing to scrutinize their bodily form” (“Doers of the Word,” 128). “Truth” minimizes the suffering and deprivations of its feminine vine, foregrounding instead the natural powers that succor the small seed and the vine’s eventual agency in overcoming the rock. Harper thus stresses the agency—not willfully violent but nevertheless ultimately irresistible—of African Americans, rather than their sufferings, as the condition of their full emergence into public citizenship, and she provides a place in her political allegory for the white sympathizers who aided African American emergence. In doing so, “Truth,” like many other of Harper’s poems, withholds from its audience’s imagination any detailed representation of the suffering African American, especially the female African American, body. Such bodily representations were of course the familiar stuff of abolitionist discourse, but they were hazardous when voiced in the first person, especially by an African American woman speaking in public—an activity that paradoxically at once sexualized her (by putting her in the realm of actresses or “public women,” prostitutes) and masculinized her (by claiming the masculine prerogative of public eloquence).6 Harper responded to this double bind, Peterson suggests, by consistently decorporealizing her poetry, both in its written form and in her oral performances, in an “attempt to eliminate the public presence of the black female body perceived as sexualized or grotesque, and to promote the voice as pure melody” (“Doers of the Word,” 124). “Truth” acts not by displaying as truth the stigmata of bodily suffering but rather through the extended allegory of truth as the clinging vine, a figure of femininity so conventional as to be almost disembodied; rather than visualize bodies, Harper’s poem signifies creatively on a stock phrase (and perhaps more than one stock phrase, in

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the post–Civil War United States: the clinging vine, Harper’s audiences might recall, bears the grapes of wrath). If not exactly “pure melody,” the abstracted seed of “Truth” comes very close to being pure figuration, antimimetic in contrast to the embodied rhetoric of sentiment.7 There is, to be sure, a bodily form scrutinized in “Truth,” but it is not the body of the suffering or the enslaved, nor the body of Harper herself as the speaker of the poem—whether conjured in the reader’s imagination from the printed page or witnessed in Harper’s own oral performances. The body chiefly under scrutiny in “Truth” is the personified body of the fallen Confederacy, the face of the slave power itself. As those of her readers versed in Anglo-American literature might have recognized, Harper’s personification in this poem trades on the secular discourses of romantic titanism as well as religious sources in the Bible and hymns: the fissured rock in “Truth” invokes not only Moses cleaving the rock but, as I have already suggested, the shattered Egyptian colossus of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” with its “frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.” Harper brings the authority of both secular and religious discourses together forcefully in “Truth”: romantic titanism and traditional African American readings of Exodus combine in Harper’s figure of the haughty monumental rock “mangled” by the humble vine. Harper’s engagement with romantic titanism in “Truth” bears comparison with Maria Lowell’s in “Africa.” Both poets seem to have drawn on this body of literary and popular images in order to lend aesthetic dignity and weight to the cause of slavery’s abolition; and in both poems these aesthetic effects dispute, or at least distance or differently frame, the mid–nineteenth century’s obsessive interest in reading bodies, especially African American bodies, for signs of racial origins and marks of suffering. But where Lowell’s “Africa” assigns to its title figure a racialized body in order to elaborate a countermyth of black origins, Harper in “Truth” eschews such mythmaking on behalf of African Americans, preferring to reverse the gaze—to give white supremacy a monumental face in order to deface it. Lowell’s and Harper’s different strategies in this respect indirectly suggest the differences between the two women’s modes of access to authorship. Although both women became published poets partly through the abolitionist movement, for Maria Lowell, unlike Harper, authorship was never connected to a vocation of embodied public eloquence. Lacking Harper’s political motives for bringing her poetry directly before large audiences of enormously mixed literacies, and absent any concern for contributing financially to her household, Maria Lowell never violated and apparently was never tempted to violate nineteenthcentury taboos on women’s public speech. Lowell did not need to “de-

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corporealize” her poetry to the same degree as Harper; not only did Lowell’s vocation not entail her own bodily exposure, but she was already relatively “decorporeal” in contrast with black women, free or slave. It was not her own body that Lowell riddled or unriddled in the dark Sphinx-mother of “Africa,” nor her own body that she “analogize[d] . . . to exotic African landscapes,” as white women abolitionists often did in representing, however sympathetically, black women’s bodies.8 For Harper, by contrast, print authorship was throughout her career inseparable from encountering the public gaze, and she was keenly aware that to some members of her audiences her embodied eloquence presented a Sphinx-like riddle: Was she woman or man, black or white? As she wrote in a now-famous letter from Columbiana, Georgia, during her Reconstruction travels, “I don’t know but that you would laugh if you were to hear some of the remarks which my lectures call forth: ‘She is a man,’ again ‘She is not colored she is painted.’ ”9 In Michael Bennett’s apt summary, the conditions of Harper’s authorship challenged her to “write the black female body into encompassing social bodies while shielding it from harm.”10 Harper’s strategy, in “Truth,” of reversing the gaze to make white supremacy the object of her prosopopoeia, while witholding direct representation of the suffering black female body, makes sense as a response to these conditions of authorship.11 Harper followed similar strategies in other of her postwar poems, even in those that spoke more directly than “Truth” to the bodily violence not only of the war itself but also of Reconstruction-era white resentment toward African Americans in the former slave states. Her “Appeal to the American People,” for example, which directly preceded “Truth” in Harper’s Poems of 1871, asked white Northern audiences to recall when With your soldiers, side by side, Helped we turn the battle’s tide, Till o’er ocean, stream and shore, Waved the rebel flag no more . . .12 Calling on white Northern “manhood” in the name of “All the offerings of our blood,” Harper demands that the North protect the nation’s most “weak and desolate” new citizens against revengeful white violence. “An Appeal” yokes Northern war memories to memories of African American courage and self-sacrifice in battle and in resistance to slavery, presciently repudiating the retrospective mythic alliance of white soldiers, North and South, as brothers-in-arms that would soon come to dominate official white commemorations of wartime male sacrifice.13 At the same time, however, “An Appeal to the American People”

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expands the conventions associating heroism with the male body and militarism. Never characterized as exclusively masculine, the blood offerings of Harper’s own people in this poem include the perilous solidarity of slaves with escaped Union prisoners as well as the sacrifices of the Civil War battlefield and the Reconstruction-era collective vulnerability to white terror of all African Americans—Harper herself included—in the South, and indeed to varying degrees in the whole of the United States. The romance of blindly obdurate masculine force, “An Appeal” along with “Truth” suggests, properly belongs to the mythmaking of the Confederacy rather than to ideal Northern “manhood.” It is the Confederate “traitor” who first “plunged his steel / Where your quivering hearts could feel,” and “the traitor’s iron heel” that now threatens to “Grind and trample in the dust / All our new-born hope and trust.” Armored under “his brow of hate,” the mechanical, singular body of white supremacy opposes the feeling and vulnerable body of a different kind of masculinity, one that hungers and feeds alongside the enslaved and quivers under attack, a collective body formed in felt solidarity with suffering. Like the more overtly feminized “Truth,” then, “An Appeal” refuses to frame the contest between white supremacy and African American emergence or between civil order and terror as a contest between symmetrical male bodies: titan against titan, personified masculine force against masculine force.14 In refusing this version of heroism, Harper distinguishes her own poetics of African American courage not only from the romance of the Confederacy’s lost cause but also from the varieties of “masculinist rhetoric,” in Carla Peterson’s phrase, that circulated within the abolitionist movement and among African Americans during and after the war. Writing for Frederick Douglass’ Paper in 1854, Harper’s own nephew, William J. Watkins, personified the energies of abolition in just such titanic masculinist terms: “The bold and dashing Reformer, who walks to and fro, with the besom of destruction in his right hand—whose business seems to be to scatter, tear, and slay, meets with opposition from almost every quarter. . . . He comes with his flaming sword, and must penetrate, if he would be successful in the end, the incrustations of ignorance, in which he finds embedded, man’s mental and moral organism.”15 As Carla Peterson observes, William Watkins “might well have perceived ‘woman’ and ‘social reformer’ as incompatible categories” (“Doers of the Word,” 121). The “bold and dashing” reformer of Watkins’s personification certainly seems endowed with a specifically masculine glamour; penetrating the “incrustations of ignorance,” Watkins’s rhetoric implies, is a manly business.16 Harper’s Reconstruction-era poetry usually envisioned its postwar work of education and nation-building quite differently. Indeed, her

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poem “The Little Builders”—which seems clearly to have been written in the first instance for recitation to the audiences of Harper’s 1864–71 lecture tours—inverts the metaphoric premises of William Watkins’s prewar rhetoric almost point for point. Where Watkins imagined his Reformer as ripping through the “incrustations of ignorance,” Harper’s extended metaphor envisions education as the slow growth of a coral reef.17 In Harper’s poem, processes of gradual incrustation and humble accretion are not inert obstacles to nation-making but rather its living conditions: Ye are builders, little builders, Not with mortar, brick and stone, But your work is far more glorious— Ye are building freedom’s throne. Where the ocean never slumbers, Works the coral ’neath the spray, By and by a reef or island Rears its head to greet the day. Then the balmy rains and sunshine Scatter treasures o’er the soil, ’Till a place for human footprints, Crown the little builder’s toil. When the stately ships sweep o’er them, Cresting all the sea with foam, Little think these patient toilers, They are building man a home. Do you ask me, precious children, How your little hands can build, That you love the name of freedom, But your fingers are unskilled? Not on thrones or in proud temples, Does fair freedom seek her rest; No, her chosen habitations, Are the hearts that love her best. Would you gain the highest freedom? Live for God and man alone, Then each heart in freedom’s temple, Would be like a living stone. Fill your minds with useful knowledge, Learn to love the true and right;

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Thus you’ll build the throne of freedom, On a pedestal of light.18 Unlike Harper’s “Truth” or “An Appeal to the American People,” “The Little Builders” does not hold up for scrutiny the personified body of the defeated slave power; its strategy is not that of reversing the gaze to focus on the face of white supremacism. Harper’s second-person address in “The Little Builders” instead dramatizes a mutual gaze, the exchange between Harper and her audience of young African American students. And the poem’s extended metaphor of the coral reef’s accretion dramatizes the prehistory and the hoped-for emergence of a new kind of national body, not yet fully visible, one in which African Americans including African American women may imagine themselves participating: the body of an ungendered collectivity, lacking an individual personified face to be scrutinized for marks of racial identities; a body monumental but without claim to the pomp of “thrones or . . . proud temples,” a body not fallen into sculptural ruins but living and growing, a temple not to a lost past but to a future yet to be.19 Like Harper’s “Truth,” “The Little Builders” signifies in multiple registers of literacy. On one level, the poem both describes and performs an elementary education in the world’s geography for an audience systematically denied it until the era of emancipation and Reconstruction: the reefs that Harper’s “precious children” can now read about become at the same time figures for their own history. On another plane of reference, “The Little Builders” invokes the topos of the Middle Passage in the “stately ships” sailing unknowingly over the growing reef; those proud ships, Harper implies, are unaware of the history being made below them. Further, the poem metaphorically rejects schemes of African repatriation or colonization as “solutions” to the presence of African Americans in the United States; the island “home” it describes is land in the process of becoming, not a place from the past for African Americans to be returned to. For some of the poem’s eventual readers, if not necessarily for its first audiences, “The Little Builders” might well have signified in still other cultural registers. Harper’s poem converses silently with a much more famous poem of the mid–nineteenth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Chambered Nautilus.” Both poems address themselves to a second “person,” but in “The Chambered Nautilus” the object of address is singular and textual—the speaker apostrophizes his own soul, in the shared, overheard privacies of print—whereas the “you” to whom Harper speaks in “The Little Builders” is collective and, in the poem’s first hearings at least, was literally realized in Harper’s audience. Both poems take their central extended metaphors from imagining marine creatures

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in the process of making their own homes, but where Harper’s coral reef, like her poem’s grammatical second person, is a collective organism, Holmes’s chambered nautilus is a glorious solitary: Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. (“The Chambered Nautilus”)20 Holmes looks to the shell of the chambered nautilus, as Harper does to the emerging coral reef, for a lesson in valuing becoming over being. In both poems this is also a lesson in freedom, as Holmes famously concludes: Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea! Freedom means different things, however, in the two poems. Harper’s conditions of freedom are collective and historical, Holmes’s strictly individual and transcendental. Freedom in “The Chambered Nautilus” eventually entails exiting from time, the body, and history altogether— the nautilus walls up behind it each of its successive, ever-larger temporary homes until it finally leaves its “low-vaulted past,” freed presumably by death. Indeed, the nautilus’s death is the precondition of Holmes’s ability to visualize and moralize upon the nautilus’s self-transcendence. “Wrecked is the ship of pearl” when the nautilus’s shell is unroofed and “its sunless crypt unsealed”; enlightenment comes to the chambered nautilus at the expense of its past selves and to Holmes at the expense of the nautilus. By contrast, freedom in “The Little Builders” is registered by the living coral reef’s emergence into visibility and history. Rising from beneath the waves to become “a place for human footprints,” Harper’s island offers itself as a kind of unmarked collective body, a “living stone” and “pedestal of light,” ready for historical inscription. “The Little Builders” does not instruct Harper’s audience of emancipated African American children to wall up their “low-vaulted past” behind them; rather, it dignifies their past, along with their present la-

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bors in their own education, as creating the conditions of their own emergence into full citizenship. In the context of Harper’s other Reconstruction-era poems, “The Little Builders” pairs strikingly with “Truth.” The action of the two poems is equal and opposite: the humble growth of Truth brings down slavery’s “mighty wrong” in the one poem, the gradual accretion of the coral upbuilds “a home for man” in the other. The coral’s “living stone” in “The Little Builders” reanimates what is obdurately proud, monumental, deadly and at last dead in the fissured rock brought down by “Truth.”21 Harper’s political allegory requires both actions in order to be complete; the nation-making of Reconstruction, she implies, requires that the false glamour of monumental fallen idols—militant white supremacy, the glorious lost cause of the Confederacy—be continuously defaced even as new, less haughty, and genuinely inclusive national institutions rise up. Like “Truth” and “The Little Builders,” Harper’s two major poetic works of the Reconstruction period, her epic poem Moses: A Story of the Nile (the earliest surviving edition of which appeared in 1869) and the “Aunt Chloe” sequence published in Sketches of Southern Life (1872), together form a diptych, but on a much more ambitious scale. As Maryemma Graham observes, Moses and Sketches of Southern Life “should be seen as complementary texts,” both concerned with “the meaning and nature of freedom.”22 Moses, like “Truth,” takes its setting and aesthetic vocabulary not only from the biblical account of Exodus but also from popular and elite discourses of Egyptian ruin and romantic titanism; like “Truth,” Moses finds its plot in the sapping of a monumental slave power from within and beneath. Against that plot “Aunt Chloe,” like “The Little Builders,” juxtaposes a deliberately antimonumental counternarrative of African American emergence—a contemporary New Testament that both echoes and fulfills Harper’s Old Testament Moses.23 “Aunt Chloe” tells through direct, episodic personal narrative the story told through an extended poetic conceit in “The Little Builders”: the story of education and institution-building, labors that accumulate from below the American civil ground on which reunited homes can stand. The diptych that Moses forms with the “Aunt Chloe” sequence derives its force not only from the complementarity of the two poems’ plots and settings but also—or even primarily—from their obvious formal complementarity: the popular ballad stanza of “Aunt Chloe” answering the Miltonic blank verse of Moses, colloquial answering formal diction. Carla Peterson’s claim that Harper “appropriated the ‘high-cultural’ form of poetry for democratic purposes” is nowhere more true of

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Harper’s poetry than of Moses’ high-art blank verse; equally true is Frances Smith Foster’s observation that in her Reconstruction poetry and oratory “Harper was mediating between cultures. . . . [Moses] resonates with multiple allusions and would have sparked interest and identification with a variety of readers ranging from the newly literate to the more experienced and well educated.”24 Harper realized her vocation for cultural mediation, I am suggesting, not only within her many Reconstruction poems, with their appeal to multiple forms of literacy, but also in the relationships she established or implied among these poems. The colloquial directness of “Aunt Chloe” acquires allusive resonance, doubles upon itself historically, when read in conjunction with Moses. The two poems’ reciprocity or complementarity, like the reciprocity between “Truth” and “The Little Builders,” embodies Harper’s sense of the necessarily double efforts of Reconstruction, double in cultural as well as political terms. Reconstruction, in Harper’s poetry, demands that old forms of political authority and identification be defaced as new forms simultaneously arise; it also demands that existing forms of literary capital be claimed even as they are critiqued and even as new forms of literary capital arise. As Harper’s extended metaphor for education in “The Little Builders” implies, her wish for postwar African American literary culture is that it build up rather than borrow the grounds of its own authority, but that building up is founded on the redoubling efforts of cultural mediation rather than in repose upon singular cultural origins. Moses and “Aunt Chloe” together carry out Harper’s program on its most ambitious poetic scale. Moses begins in epic fashion, in medias res; departing from the chronicle form of Exodus, which begins with the lineage of Moses and continues through his birth and rescue from the Nile, Harper launches her poem after the adult Moses, prince of Egypt, has reached his decision to “join / The fortunes of my race.”25 The poem opens on a dramatic dialogue, without any direct source in Exodus, in which Moses communicates his decision to his adoptive Egyptian mother, Charmian, who tries to dissuade him from abandoning his “kingly state” in favor of “The badge of servitude and toil” (I, 139). Unsuccessful in her initial appeal to Moses’ accustomed sense of power and luxury, Charmian falls back upon memory and sentiment, recalling for Moses that “I saved thee twice”—once from the Nile and once from her own father, who would have killed the baby save for his recollection of Charmian’s mother, reborn in Charmian’s love for Moses; having twice been saved at her hands, she avers, Moses is “Doubly mine” (I, 142). The difficulty with Charmian’s appeal to memory and maternal self-sacrifice, however, is precisely that Moses can double it; to her recollections he opposes his own memory of “The Hebrew nurse to whom thou gavest thy found-

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ling,” his birth mother (I, 143). Their dialogue (and the first chapter of the poem as a whole) ends with Charmian returning, baffled, to the selfevident logic of power—“I never heard of men resigning ease for toil, / The splendor of a palace for the squalor / Of a hut” (I, 144). The poem’s authoritative omniscient narrator then emerges from behind the characters’ dialogue to read them into history, where the end of the story is already known: Moses, God’s chosen, will “lead his captive race to freedom” and become “a bright / Ensample through the changing centuries of time” (I, 145). Harper’s opening strategy in Moses serves many purposes. By beginning not with Moses’ individual decision to embrace his Hebrew origins but with his telling Charmian of his decision—by beginning with dialogue rather than with soliloquy or narrative reporting—Harper represents this decision from the outset as an intersubjective act laden with consequences for Charmian as well as for Moses. Furthermore, Charmian’s and Moses’ competing retrospective narratives of Moses’ boyhood are both layered with the reported speech of others: Charmian’s father the Pharaoh, Moses’ Hebrew mother. Their dialogue thus not only supplies, by flashback, the familiar opening of the Exodus story; it also underlines how intricately divided Moses’ narrative of origins is between his Egyptian and his Hebrew parentage. Omitting the opening accounts in Exodus of Moses’ lineage in favor of Charmian’s and Moses’ dramatic dialogue emphasizes that for Harper’s Moses a relation to the past is not given but must instead be seized; Harper’s cutting across the Exodus chronicle thus links her poem not only to classical Mediterranean epic’s in medias res plotting but also to her contemporary tradition of African American slave narratives, which so often begin with the problem of missing origins and broken lineages.26 Harper dispenses, however, with classical epic’s opening invocation, which locates the poet within the tradition and invests him with authority to sing himself into it. By beginning instead with Moses’ and Charmian’s dramatic dialogue and deferring the entry of her omniscient narrator, Harper not only foregrounds Moses’ problem of dual origins but also implies, by omission, that her own poetic authority emerges otherwise—from divided cultural origins and interrupted lines of cultural transmission, rather than from unbroken monological inheritance. Poetic authority of this divided and interrupted kind, Moses suggests, travels on the female line—on the maternal line divided between Charmian and Moses’ Hebrew mother, who together represent to Moses the question of his own origins and cultural allegiance. As Frances Smith Foster observes, Harper’s Moses consistently “gives the women larger, more active parts in the liberation story” than does Exodus: “Harper invents a childhood characterized by deep love and devotion between

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Moses and his two mothers. She presents these women as strong, intelligent, and morally courageous and suggests that Moses’ heroism was nurtured by their examples” (Written by Herself, 136). Women are clearly the chief bearers of culture to Moses on both the Hebrew and the Egyptian side, and yet the cultural authority of both mothers is compromised, and their relationship to one another, as Harper’s poem imagines it, complex; they mirror one another in opposition as well as in likeness. Unlike Charmian, for whom Harper borrows a Shakespearean proper name without authority in Exodus (and unlike Moses’ Hebrew father, for whom Harper invents a name, Amram), Moses’ Hebrew mother remains without a proper name in Harper’s poem—even as Moses twice credits her with transmitting to him the “grand traditions of our race” (I, 143; II, 148). In Foster’s words, “It was the mother’s ancestral stories that gave Moses his strong identification with his race” (Written by Herself, 138); serving as nurse to the young Moses in Charmian’s household, his Hebrew mother spliced the broken thread of cultural transmission by passing on the oral history of the Israelites to Moses. As Moses recalls them when he returns to his Hebrew family in chapter 2 of Harper’s poem, his Hebrew mother’s stories strung together for him an all-male ancestry of patriarchs—the familiar biblical lineage deferred by the dramatic opening of Moses: . . . I heard Thee tell the grand traditions of our race, The blessed hopes and glorious promises That weave their golden threads among the sombre Tissues of our lives, and shimmer still amid The gloom and shadows of our lot. Again I heard thee tell of Abraham, with his constant Faith and earnest trust in God, unto whom The promise came that in his seed should all The nations of the earth be blessed. Of Isaac, Blessing with disappointed lips his first born son, From whom the birthright had departed. Of Jacob, With his warm affections and his devious ways Flying before the wrath of Esau . . . (2.148) Fortified with his mother’s “golden” account of the patriarchs, Moses publicly refuses, before Pharaoh and all his princes and priests, to “be engrafted / Into Pharaoh’s royal line, and be called / The son of Pharaoh’s daughter” (2.148). Instead he leaves Pharaoh’s palace for his Hebrew family’s hut, where he implicitly repays his mother’s oral histo-

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ries by telling his Hebrew family the story of how he refused the Pharaoh’s offer. Where chapter I of Moses began with Moses in dialogue with his Egyptian mother, Charmian, chapter 2 concludes with him thanking his Hebrew mother for her lessons and telling his Hebrew family that he has “left the pomp and pride of Egypt / To cast my lot among the people of my race” (2.149). The symmetries between chapters 1 and 2 of Moses underline how insistently Harper’s poem, against the grain of its source in Exodus, associates questions of cultural origins and transmission with women.27 Not only do both opening chapters foreground the importance of Moses’ Hebrew mother in his choice to identify himself with “the people of my race”; their plotting also represents the major events of Moses’ life, up through his public decision to reject “Pharaoh’s royal line,” retrospectively—through Moses’ extended conversations with his two mothers. The beginning of Moses pushes offstage the large public actions of its hero in the world of other men, inaugurating its epic instead with the exchange of stories between Moses and his mothers.28 The symmetries between chapters 1 and 2 also point, however, to the limits of women’s cultural authority in both Egypt and Israel. Egypt invites Moses to call himself “The son of Pharaoh’s daughter,” to embrace his adopted origins publicly through and in the name of his Egyptian mother; and yet Charmian herself loses her proper name in that ceremonial formula (taken almost directly from Exodus),29 which names her only as the medium for recruiting a new son to Pharaoh’s kingly house. Moses’ Hebrew mother, similarly, is for him the beloved oral medium of cultural transmission but not part of its patrilineal message; when he leaves the palace for the hut, he is able to call by name not only the patriarchs of his ancestry but also every living member of his Hebrew family except the mother who passed on to him the “the grand traditions of our race.” The problem of women’s authority over language and culture will remain a problem in Moses, to return most visibly toward the poem’s end in the song of Miriam. The central chapters of the poem, however, are concerned with exploring the relationship established in the poem’s opening between maternal inheritance and Moses’ male leadership. In this respect Harper’s 1869 poem anticipates the African American cultural program that critic Hortense Spillers, writing in 1987, would call for: “It is the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood” and his relation to leadership, over and against the pathologizing of supposed “black matriarchy” as slavery’s historical legacy.30 Orally transmitted and compromised in relation to public, patrilineal naming, his dual maternal heritage nevertheless enables Moses’ emergence into leadership.

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Significantly, the first action that Moses takes following his decision “To cast my lot among the people of my race” indirectly strikes back at Pharaoh’s ambition to immortalize himself in patrilineal writing: The love of Moses for his race soon found A stern expression. Pharaoh was building A pyramid; ambitious, cold and proud, He scrupled not at means to gain his ends. When he feared the growing power of Israel He stained his hands in children’s blood, and held A carnival of death in Goshen; but now He wished to hand his name and memory Down unto the distant ages, and instead Of lading that memory with the precious Fragrance of the kindest deeds and words, he Essayed to write it out in stone, as cold, And hard, and heartless as himself. (3.149) What follows hews closely to the story as Harper found it in Exodus. The Pharaoh’s “heartless” craving to write his name in stone redoubles the labors of his Hebrew slaves; witnessing an overseer’s mistreatment of an aged man, Moses strikes and kills the overseer, knows himself a marked man when other slaves throw the killing back in his face, and flees Egypt for the desert. As in Harper’s “Truth,” the enslaving power in Moses longs to embody itself in monumental stone, an ambition that here as well as in “Truth” foretells its own defacement. Moses links this ambition to the engraving of the patrilineal name, a relation to language that literalizes the metaphorically stony attributes of its author and aims to transmit its subject to posterity in his own ideally fixed, phallic, monumental image. Harper’s narrator explicitly contrasts this relation to memorial language—monumental, written, and deadly—with an alternative model of cultural transmission, one that secures memory with “fragrance” rather than monumental writing and that yokes memory’s “fragrance” with memory as labor, “lading.” Symbolically coded as female (like the vine that saps the haughty rock in “Truth”), this alternative model of cultural transmission is also implicitly oral not only in its potential for evanescence but also in its emphasis on intersubjectivity and proximity as against the “distant ages” to which the Pharaoh commends his stony writing. In its connections with labor and orality, this model clearly belongs to Israel rather than to Egypt—and yet not only to Israel, and not to Israel in its mode of patrilineal inheritance. Memory’s “precious fragrance” recalls Moses’ conversations with both of his mothers in the

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opening of the poem: Charmian’s dialogue with Moses (1.140) links memory with fragrance and intimacy, although also with idleness and revery (she remembers “The breath of lilies, fainting on the air” that prompted her to rise from her “torpor” and revisit the Nile where she found Moses). Moses’ Hebrew mother, too, remembers the lilies of the Nile, but as tokens of nurturing labors rather than ennui; her laying of Moses in his basket (“by faith I wove / The rushes of thine ark and laid thee ’mid / The flags and lilies of the Nile” [2.147]) anticipates the narrator’s model of memory as “lading.” In their different ways, however, both of his mothers transmit to Moses memories embodied in “kindest deeds and words” rather than in Pharaoh’s monumental patrilineal writing. Moses acts out this maternal inheritance in both deeds and words, striking down the Pharaoh’s overseer but first calling upon him to have compassion for the aged man he strikes, whose “head is whiter than our / Desert sands” (3.150; his words of kindness have no source in Exodus, which instead emphasizes Moses’ efforts to conceal the killing). The overseer’s death finally resolves the ambiguity of Moses’ dual identifications; to take up his lot “among the people of my race” is to choose actively against Egypt, and “like one who cuts away / The bridge on which he has walked in safety / To the other side, so Moses cut off all retreat / To Pharaoh’s throne” (4.151). In thus simplifying the identifications of its hero, Moses also at this point cuts away formally from its elaborate retrospective narratives and paired scenes, Egyptian and Hebrew. What follows is, by comparison with the poem’s opening chapters, both a direct linear narrative and one relatively faithful to Exodus as Harper follows Moses through his exile in the desert, his return to Egypt at the behest of the burning bush, his calling down of plagues on Egypt, and finally the departure of the Hebrews through the Red Sea and their entry into the desert. Moses does not entirely abandon its opening concern with the complexity of Moses’ dual origins, however; it does not simply substitute one patrilineal written authority, that of Exodus, for the Pharaoh’s. Rather, it relocates that concern, both formally and on the level of character, by assigning it to Moses’ sister Miriam and her song, a lyric poem interpolated into Harper’s blank verse narrative. As Frances Smith Foster observes, Moses gives Miriam much more autonomy than does Exodus 15 (where she earns only two verses and repeats the song Moses has already sung after the parting of the Red Sea and the destruction of the Pharaoh’s army): “Harper emphasizes Miriam’s perspective by setting the song apart from the rest of the text and presenting it as a separate poem with its own distinctive rhythm and rhyme patterns. . . . In focusing upon Miriam and her song, Harper implicitly makes a case for women’s active participation in politics and she gives a biblical pre-

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cedent for women as poets and social analysts” (Written by Herself, 138).31 In setting off her words formally, Harper’s poem makes Miriam’s perspective distinctive in other important ways as well: returning to the opening chapters of the poem, her song draws its inspiration from the memory of both Moses’ mothers, Hebrew and Egyptian. Like the Princess Charmian in chapter 1, Miriam before she breaks into song revisits the scene of Moses’ dual origins by gazing in imagination on the flowing Nile: . . . her eyes flashed out the splendor Of long departed days, for time itself seemed Pausing, and she lived the past again; again The Nile flowed by her; she was watching by the stream, A little ark of rushes where her baby brother lay; The tender tide of rapture swept o’er her soul again She had felt when Pharaoh’s daughter had claimed Him as her own, and her mother wept for joy Above her rescued son. (6.160) As in Charmian’s revery, the Nile in Miriam’s recollection is both the literal object of memory and a figure for memory itself. Miriam’s “tender tide of rapture” metaphorically internalizes the Nile that connected Miriam, Charmian, and Moses’ Hebrew mother, making the Nile a figure not only for memory generally but more specifically for female memory and maternal cultural inheritance. In a striking reversal of the exchanges of women that classically sustain patriarchies,32 Miriam’s recollection suggests that the exchange of the boy-phallus Moses among the three women through the medium of the Nile—the Nile both real and remembered, literal and figurative—lies at the foundation of the new nation of Israel. Miriam experiences this flow of recollection, however, on the shore of the Red Sea, where “the wall of flood” (6.160) has just swallowed up Pharaoh’s pursuing army. “Tender” though her raptures of memory may be, this setting implies, they are allied with nation-making acts of epic violence. Miriam’s song extends this alliance further, celebrating an openly vengeful “melt[ing]” of Egyptian pleasures into destruction: A wail in the palace, a wail in the hut, The midnight is shivering with dread, And Egypt wakes up with a shriek and a sob To mourn for her first-born and dead. In the morning glad voices greeted the light, As the Nile with its splendor was flushed;

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At midnight silence had melted their tones, And their music forever is hushed. In the morning the princes of palace and court To the heir of the kingdom bowed down; ’Tis midnight, pallid and stark in his shroud He dreams not of kingdom or crown. As a monument blasted and blighted by God, Through the ages proud Pharaoh shall stand, All seamed with the vengeance and scarred with the wrath That leaped from God’s terrible hand. (6.160–61) Merging the Pharaoh’s ambitions for his pyramid with Pharaoh himself, Miriam’s song visits upon them both the fate of the haughty rock in Harper’s poem “Truth”: in Moses as in that poem, the slave power’s monumental face is realized only in order to be defaced. Pharaoh’s lust to write his “name and memory” into stone (3.149), an ambition that denies the labor of the slave hands actually building his monument, is both fulfilled and denied here: turned to stone, like his “pallid and stark” dead son, he is denied his patrilineal succession and written over by God’s vengeful hand. In another sense, of course, the writing hand here is Harper’s. As Foster observes, the prominence of Miriam’s song in Harper’s Moses, by contrast with Exodus, “privileges women’s writing” (Written by Herself, 137); Miriam’s song directly invokes the power that inscribes the Decalogue, without needing authorization from Moses or a male priesthood. What follows her song goes still further in revising Exodus to grant women’s writing independent access to divine inspiration: when Moses turns to the story of the Decalogue in chapter 7, Harper manages to write the titular hero of her poem entirely out of the narrative. Exodus has Moses ascending Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments and convey them to the people of Israel, standing “afar off” for fear lest God speak to them directly (Exodus 20:19–20); Harper’s narrator, by contrast, imagines “the solemn / Decalogue” proclaimed directly “Unto their listening ears” (7.161). Displacing the mediating authority assigned to Moses in Exodus, Harper’s narrator first hears the Decalogue from the perspective of the assembled Israelites and then steps forward to address the poem’s contemporary audience directly, in the present tense: God’s fearful splendor Flowed around, and Sinai quaked and shuddered To its base, and there did God proclaim

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Unto their listening ears, the great, the grand, The central and the primal truth of all The universe—the unity of God. Only one God,— This truth received into the world’s great life, Not as an idle dream nor speculative thing, But as a living, vitalizing thought, Should bind us closer to our God And link us with our fellow man, the brothers and co-heirs With Christ, the elder brother of our race. Before this truth let every blade of war Grow dull, and slavery, cowering at the light, Skulk from the homes of men; instead Of war bring peace and freedom, love and joy, And light for man, instead of bondage, whips And chains. (7.161–62) In bringing forward into the present and into her audience’s historical circumstances the central message of the Decalogue, Harper’s narrator assumes the mantle of Moses for herself. Remarkably, then, the climax of this epic poem about the emergence of a male leader temporarily sets him aside in favor of female cultural authority. In the liberties it takes not only with the written text of Exodus but also with popular African American retellings of the Moses story,33 Harper’s Moses tests the limits of revisionist possibility set by her Christian faith and her communities of listeners and readers, both African American and white. And yet the experiments of Harper’s poem have their precedents in both African American history and the Bible itself. As Harper in 1866 reminded an audience assembled at the Eleventh Woman’s Rights Convention, “We have a woman in our country who has received the name of ‘Moses,’ ” Harriet Tubman, “who has gone down into the Egypt of slavery and brought out hundreds of our people into liberty.”34 In imagining the handing down of the Decalogue without Moses, or with a black woman Moses, Harper’s poem does not diminish belief in its biblical hero, or in the possibilities of individual male leaders as such; rather, it attacks, in the name of the First Commandment, modes of belief and authority that assume the form of idolatry. The Pharaoh’s rule, identified with his monumental pyramid, is Harper’s example in Moses of such authority, as is the haughty rock in “Truth.” Both poems identify slave powers with graven images, and both poems exact the same appropriate vengeance; as the Pharaoh sacrifices human bodies to the erection of his pyramid, so he shall share

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the fate of the monument “blasted and blighted by God” in Miriam’s song. As chapter 7 of Moses underlines, Harper’s deeply Protestant understanding of the Decalogue’s commandments against idolatry provides her Reconstruction-era poetry with an implicit theory of both racism and sexism: in this theory, white supremacy and male dominance alike erect their own bodily images in the place of God.35 In Moses as in her other Reconstruction poems, Harper both saps these idols by reversing the gaze—turning their own idolatrous premise against them—and replaces them with other possibilities, with anti-idolatrous collective social bodies like that of the coral reef in “The Little Builders.” That Moses can disappear from the climax of Moses makes clear that his leadership is not a form of idolatry. That Miriam emerges to take precedence over Moses in the Israelites’ triumphant song by the Red Sea makes clear that women, too, in a state of freedom rightly have direct access to the kind of authority Moses earns; unlike her mother, Miriam can originate as well as transmit “the grand traditions of our race,” and can do so under her own proper name. Finally, that Moses assigns the revelation of the Decalogue to its impersonal narrator rather than its titular hero generalizes (and, for Harper, inevitably Christianizes) this point to all humanity: “if God is only one / Then we are the children of his mighty hand,” and there is no one bodily race or shape or culture of origin to whom this revelation uniquely belongs, no one race or shape with authority to mediate this revelation for others, any more than “haughty rulers” have the right to “throw their selfish lives between / God’s sunshine and the shivering poor” (7.162). The full implications of this revelation, Harper’s turn to direct address and the present tense in chapter 7 of Moses imply, lie beyond the historical scope of her narrative. The conclusion of Harper’s epic returns, then, to the biblical story and the career of Moses as leader. Telescoping the events of Exodus and Deuteronomy, Moses passes swiftly from recounting Moses’ struggles with the Israelites’ lapses into idolatry into its final chapter, “The Death of Moses.” Harper’s account emphasizes not only Moses’s biblical vision atop Mount Nebo—the promised land to which post–Civil War African Americans, like Israel in the desert, directed their hopes of possession—but even more Moses’ burial in an unmarked grave, a theme Harper had also sounded before the war in her poem “The Burial of Moses.”36 In Moses, the hero’s unknown sepulchre marks the final distinction between Moses and Pharaoh; it is the poem’s closing, emphatic way of detaching the authority of Moses from idolatry. Like the grave Harper imagines for herself in one of her bestknown poems, “Bury Me in a Free Land,” Moses’ burial place has “no monument, proud and high / To arrest the gaze of the passers by.”37

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What Moses’ grave does have, instead of monumental phallic inscription, is a feminine lyric—the poem’s second lyric set off formally (in this instance, by trimeter lines) from the surrounding blank verse narrative. Unlike Miriam’s earlier song, this lyric has no definite personal speaker; although associated with the “troupe of fair young angels” that lay Moses to rest, making “music as they trod” (9.165), this final lyric seems an inspired but necessarily nonliteral transcription of that unheard music, as Harper’s Moses is an inspired but nonliteral retelling of Exodus itself. Also unlike Miriam’s song, and exceptionally in Harper’s poetic oeuvre, this lyric has no consistent rhyme scheme; its lines group themselves with irregular freedom, through off-rhymes and assonance (“grave” / “laid,” “spot” / “hillock”), up to the off-rhyme that almost makes a couplet of the final two lines: “And truthful lips have never said / We know where he is laid” (9.166)—as if to imagine a return to earthly lips from heavenly music were to descend back into predictable rhyme. Suggesting but never quite arriving at the regular closure of Harper’s typical ballad and hymn stanzas, the closing lyric of Moses, like the poem’s representation of the Decalogue in chapter 7, holds Harper’s Old Testament epic open to futurity; its promised land is not yet a realized place. Harper’s Aunt Chloe sequence, published three years after Moses, takes up that opening to futurity within the not yet realized social promise of Reconstruction. The opening two poems of the sequence, “Aunt Chloe” and “The Deliverance,” recall Moses in several ways. “I remember, well remember,” begins “Aunt Chloe”; what she remembers is first the loss of her own son, sold away to pay her dead master’s debts, and then, in “Deliverance,” the departure of her mistress’s son Thomas to the Civil War.38 As Foster notes, Mister Tom’s departure is “ironically reminiscent of the parting between Moses and Charmian,” in which Charmian loses her son to his sense of “higher calling” (Written by Herself, 147). Like the opening two chapters of Moses, “Aunt Chloe” and “The Deliverance” juxtapose two mothers’ claims to their children; both mothers’ claims are treated with sympathy but not as morally symmetrical. Like Moses, the Aunt Chloe sequence ties the slave mother’s loss of her sons to the question of her authority as a transmitter of culture. Moses’ alienation from his Hebrew family has the ironic effect of installing his birth mother, serving as his nurse, in the role of culture-bearer to him, transmitter of the patrilineal story in which she herself has no name. Similarly, the opening of the Aunt Chloe sequence roots Aunt Chloe’s authority as a storyteller in the loss of her sons, which initiates her remembrance: the return of her son Jakey in the last poem of the sequence, “The Reunion,” signals the end of her narrative, as Moses’ re-

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turn to his Hebrew family forecloses his mother’s role as a transmitter of culture. Aunt Chloe chronicles the acts of Jacob and Benjamin and David in her own world, as Moses’ mother tells him of his male ancestors in Abraham and Jacob; Aunt Chloe’s narrative, however, includes by name heroic women “radicals,” like Aunt Kitty, Milly Green, and Lucinda Grange in “The Deliverance,” who discipline husbands tempted to sell their votes (204). Moreover, in pointed contrast with the mother of Moses, Aunt Chloe not only enters the poem possessed of a proper name but also gains another name and a title of respect over the course of the sequence, becoming “Missis Chloe Fleet,” as her son hails her, in “The Reunion” (207).39 In the Aunt Chloe sequence, women—if not yet fully granted the rights of citizenship—are from the beginning both transmitters of and acknowledged as powerful agents in their people’s history. As Foster points out, the Exodus story of Chloe’s “Deliverance” has its own version of a Moses figure in the shape of Abraham Lincoln, whose Emancipation Proclamation (announced to Aunt Chloe’s village by the arriving Union troops) causes the slaves to laugh and dance like the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea (Written by Herself, 148). Like Moses, however, the Aunt Chloe sequence carefully detaches its warm admiration for Lincoln from idolatry. By contrast with many poems written in the wake of his assassination—the literary record of what Kirk Savage calls an “outbreak of commemorative fever . . . unprecedented in American history”—Harper’s Aunt Chloe sequence markedly declines to turn itself into a sepulchre for Lincoln’s memory.40 Like Moses, Aunt Chloe’s Lincoln ascends to heaven without her feeling the need of a proud monument to him on earth. Lincoln’s assassination and Aunt Chloe’s mourning for him occupy two stanzas in the middle of “The Deliverance” (coincidentally like the scant two verses allotted Miriam’s song in Exodus); his death does not arrest the momentum of Aunt Chloe’s story. Furthermore, the one white male leader explicitly identified by the liberated slaves in the poem as a Moses figure, President Andrew Johnson, utterly fails to fulfill his role: Then we had another President,— What do you call his name? Well, if the colored folks forget him They would’nt be much to blame. We thought he’d be the Moses Of all the colored race; But when the Rebels pressed us hard He never showed his face. (BCD, 202)

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Aunt Chloe’s scorn for Johnson strips him not only of his identification with Moses but also of his own surname, the marker of social respect that she herself attains in the course of her poem; the civic standing that he fails to safeguard for African Americans she reciprocally withholds from him.41 To extend her own metaphor, she defaces Johnson’s authority, as Miriam’s song in Moses imagines the Pharaoh’s graven image defaced. The Aunt Chloe sequence continues Harper’s concern for detaching legitimate modes of authority from idolatry, extending it to African American civic, cultural, religious, and familial authority as well as to national politics. After “The Deliverance,” Chloe’s narrative turns to the building of school, church, and family—anti-idolatrous collective institutions, in Harper’s characteristic Reconstruction poetics. “Learning to Read” honors the “Yankee teachers” who established schools in the postwar South but also makes clear that their efforts were founded upon African Americans’ own individual and collective efforts toward literacy, even under slavery.42 When she takes up learning to read, Aunt Chloe’s enabling models are not the anonymous but helpful Yankee teachers but rather “Mr. Turner’s Ben,” who learned to read by overhearing white children’s instruction, and “Uncle Caldwell, / Who took pot-liquor fat / And greased the pages of his book, / And hid it in his hat” (205). Chloe’s temporary inhabiting of one institution, the Yankee school, leads her to another and more autonomous dwelling by the end of “Learning to Read”: “I got a little cabin— / A place to call my own— / And I felt as independent / As the queen upon her throne” (206). This autonomous cabin, however, is not an end in itself but rather opens into still another, emphatically communal building: “Church Building” follows “Learning to Read.” Erected under the leadership and religious inspiration of Uncle Jacob, the church built by the freed slaves, unlike the school, makes no reference at all to white authority. Equally, however, the free church does not depend in essence upon the charismatic male leadership of Uncle Jacob, who departs and soon dies in another town after giving his blessing to the new church. The church continues without his literal presence; its building is not Jacob’s sepulchre (his body does not return) but an opening to the promised land—“a gate into the city” where the congregation hopes to meet again. Once again, Harper eliminates her prophetic male leader from what might have been expected to be the climax of his authority, and to the same radically Protestant religious and political ends: Aunt Chloe, Harper implies, no less than the narrator of Moses, enjoys unmediated access to divine revelation as well as to the secular history of her own people. Chloe’s language also enjoys direct access to literary authority, insofar

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as Harper can make that possible. In the Aunt Chloe sequence, unlike Harper’s prose fiction, no narrator interposes a more formal sociolect between Chloe’s idiom and Harper’s audience.43 In the sphere of culture, then, Harper’s Reconstruction-era critique of idolatry takes polite Anglo-American literary language as one of its objects. As her writings before and after Sketches of Southern Life make clear, however, Harper never disavowed her own educated facility in the language of polite letters or represented her later (and equally acquired, and no less literary)44 facility in Chloe’s language as a more legitimate or innate cultural inheritance. Read together, the diptych of Moses and the Aunt Chloe poems says rather that the authorized literary language is not uniquely privileged to mediate other languages: the Aunt Chloe sequence reflects back upon Moses with at least as much power as Moses anticipates Aunt Chloe’s narrative. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s body of Reconstruction-era poetry marks a major episode in the history of African American women’s literary emergence. It also participates in the late nineteenth-century American construction of literary whiteness and in the disciplinary formation of literary studies—albeit indirectly and in ways that current histories of literary studies in the United States have yet fully to map. As Paul Lauter and Elizabeth Ammons, among others, have observed, the final (and highly productive) decades of Frances Harper’s literary career coincided with the professionalization of literary studies in the later nineteenth-century United States, the familiar emblematic date of which is the 1883 founding of the Modern Language Association of America.45 The professionalization of literary studies in the modern vernaculars, bent on laying siege to the university curriculum, proceeded in tandem—although not always in lockstep—with the elaboration and stratification of the field of literary production itself. “American literature is looking as never before, to our colleges for her literary men,— her writers and critics,” crowed a Princeton professor of English in the first volume of the Publications of the Modern Language Association, asserting his own professional prerogative through the ever-evolving linkages between the university curriculum and elite cultural production.46 If the newly professional teachers of literature from time to time sweepingly denounced the wasteland of contemporary writing by contrast with the purer achievements of the Anglo-American literary past of which they declared themselves the expert custodians, at the fin de si`ecle their interests more often joined them with the nation’s increasing numbers of high-art literary authors and aspirants in hailing the aesthetic dignity of those “best and proudest” specimens of American English literature they judged “true to the great tradition of English thought

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and English style” and thus deserving of a place in the university curriculum.47 Both late nineteenth-century developments—the professionalization of literary studies and the escalating stratifications of the literary field— bore risks as well as opportunities for women writers generally, African American women writers especially, and Harper particularly. As many recent critics of American literary studies have noted, it is in fact literary men whom the Princeton professor actually taught and ideally envisioned as his students, and it was white male American writers almost uniformly that the newly professional teachers of literature in the United States entered into the curriculum alongside Milton and Pope.48 On the other hand, as Richard Brodhead has argued most forcefully, later nineteenth-century American literary culture, especially in its regionalist genres, opened up niches, “minor” stations within elite writing, that women writers, writers from the provinces, and writers of color were able to occupy without benefit of the classical literary education being challenged elsewhere, and for their own professional motives, by the teachers of literature in English and other modern vernaculars.49 Those of Harper’s critics who have located her in these historical developments have issued divided but increasingly nuanced assessments of their implications for Harper’s self-positioning as an author and her relation to the emergent pedagogical canon of American literature. While fully crediting Harper’s complex political aims along with her “formal struggle” in her novel Iola Leroy (1892), Elizabeth Ammons places Harper among the “serious women writers at the turn into the twentieth century [who] were determined to invade the territory of high art traditionally posted in western culture as the exclusive property of privileged white men.”50 Paul Lauter’s influential analysis of American literary studies in the early twentieth century, on the other hand, emphasizes how the “territory of high art” by the 1920s had been reposted against trespass by professors anxious to reassert the masculinity of a discipline only too open, in their view, to female and nonwhite interlopers. In Lauter’s reading, Harper’s instrumental social writing found no place in an early twentieth-century American literary canon constituted in the force field between the professors’ drive for disciplinary autonomy and literary modernism’s drive for aesthetic autonomy over and against the forms of nineteenth-century gentility allied with women writers.51 More recently, both Frances Smith Foster and Carla Peterson have amplified these arguments by attending more closely to the specifically African American cultural fields of Harper’s writing and reception. Rather than jostle for place in Gilded Age cultural hierarchies, Peterson argues, Harper’s Reconstruction-era writings seek to build postwar African American civil society partly in the image, and through the literary

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techniques, of Brodhead’s antebellum “domestic or middlebrow world of letters”; rather than pursue high-cultural ends of autonomous aesthetic distinction, Harper’s Reconstruction writings “promote the disciplinary ethos” characteristic of the middlebrow antebellum world of tutelary intimacy “to a broad audience for the purpose of community building.”52 Foster’s discussion of Harper’s relationship to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Press similarly stresses the middling location of Harper’s writing. That location, Foster suggests, has been difficult to read even through the medium of African American literary studies, which has tended “to deify the modernists and the revolutionaries and to entertain the folk or primitive over the productions that reflect the aesthetics and values of the churchgoing Christians or the black middle class and those who aspire to it”—has tended, in other words, “to privilege the extremes” of cultural hierarchy over the middlebrow civil space that Harper sought to build and dignify in her postwar writings.53 Tutelary community-building is patently Harper’s purpose in a poem like “The Little Builders,” and in my reading of it this poem, like others in Harper’s Reconstruction period, does indeed position itself deliberately in a middle ground of culture, mediating between elementary education and oral tradition on the one hand and high-art realms of allusion on the other. And yet my reading of Harper’s Reconstruction writing also suggests that Harper’s efforts, along with those of other African American authors, to open and sustain a postwar middlebrow sphere of African American letters could not but be shaped, even if at a distance, by the cultural hierarchies she resisted and the competitions she refused.54 (As Harper’s near contemporaries Helen Hunt Jackson and Josiah Holland would also discover in the postwar American cultural field, middlebrow efforts to overcome cultural hierarchies sometimes had the paradoxical effect of hardening ever more finely delineated distinctions within them.) Tellingly, the AME Christian Recorder, Harper’s main periodical publishing outlet after the war, broadened its at one time strictly religious focus by establishing in the mid-1870s literary columns that noted developments in relatively elite secular journals like Scribner’s as well as in the black religious press; Harper’s African American middlebrow space thus began marking its self-consciousness of being one position among other cultural possibilities.55 Harper also put her mark on the cultural hierarchies that marked her, even if that mark is difficult or impossible to recover from within the disciplinary history of turn-of-the-century literary studies as the Modern Language Association aimed to professionalize them.56 There was, however, a disciplinary formation contemporary with the founding of the Modern Language Association in which Harper—as well as other pop-

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ular women poets like Lucy Larcom, Celia Thaxter, and Helen Hunt Jackson—did for a time share space in a pedagogical canon that also encompassed writers like Hawthorne, Tennyson, and Shakespeare. That discipline, in the late nineteenth-century United States, was elocution: the much-transformed, ambiguously professionalized inheritor of the pedagogical traditions in which we have already glimpsed the Davidson sisters inhabiting the earlier nineteenth century’s textbooks. To look at Harper’s appearance in this now-obscure disciplinary formation is to understand more about her absence from the other; it also helps illuminate how these disciplines for a time competed with one another for dominance in literary education on the grounds of their different imaginations of whiteness. The February 1901 issue of Werner’s Magazine, a New York periodical aimed at professional “elocutionists” across the United States, opens with an arresting image of “The Great Sphinx” (figure 4.1). The photo’s caption enjoins readers to “remember [that] Africa cradled more than savages. . . . To their great monument, the Sphinx, the Egyptians gave an Ethiopic cast of features, an outline almost reproduced in many finely characteristic negro faces of today.”57 Turning the page, Werner’s readers found themselves confronted with a portrait gallery of African Americans, including Mary Church Terrell, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Booker T. Washington, chosen by Werner’s editors as “representative colored Americans active in expressional art” (figure 4.2). Together, these images preface a long lead article, generously sprinkled with further illustrations, titled the “Expressional Power of the Colored Race”— an extensive survey of African Americans in active political oratory and authorship, like Frederick Douglass; lecturers on more generally improving topics; musicians, among them the Jubilee singers of Fisk University and several early African American operatic performers and classical composers; professors of “English and Elocution”; dramatic actors; and “platform artists” who combined recitation with vaudeville entertainment. The article briefly canvasses the career of “Miss Mary E. Harper, a thoroughly equipped elocutionist” who “has traveled through the South lecturing on the science of expression” and some pages later gives a lengthier tribute to “A woman whose interest and activity have covered a wide field . . . Mrs. Frances E. W. Harper.” Confused on important matters of biographical fact—it erroneously declares Harper to have been born a slave who received “almost no education other than what she picked up from libraries in houses where she served” and seems unaware that Mary E. Harper and Frances E. W. Harper are mother and daughter—the article nevertheless notes more accurately Harper’s honors as a political speaker (“As an anti-slavery lecturer she developed power of eloquence”), as well as her recent successes in the

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Figure 4.1 “The Great Sphinx. The American negro confesses the savage Africa as his source, but let us remember Africa cradled more than savages. The Ethiopic tongue (Geez) was long a language of literary cultivation under Christian influence. The splendid qualities of the Egyptians ring down the centuries. Their tongue proves distant relationship to Semitic blood. To their great monument, the Sphinx, the Egyptians gave an Ethiopic cast of features, an outline almost reproduced in many finely characteristic negro faces of to-day.” From Werner’s Magazine 26, no. 6 (February 1901). By permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library.

literary marketplace (“her story ‘Iola Leroy’ reach[ed] its third edition”).58 A few pages later, the “Recitation Department” of the magazine prints Harper’s “The Dying Bondman” among its suggested performance pieces, along with an entire evening’s program of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life (“a little realism may be introduced by using a real cornstalk fiddle when reciting ‘The Cornstalk Fiddle’ ”) and a set of fantastically detailed gestural instructions, in the nineteenthcentury Delsarte school of whole-body dramatic training, for reading Bryant’s “The Hurricane.”59 Why would the struggling profession of elocution at the turn of the century recognize itself—as well as African American artists—in the

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Figure 4.2 From Werner’s Magazine 26, no. 6 (February 1901). By permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library.

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figure of an emphatically “Ethiopian” Sphinx? By contrast with the many antebellum American observers unable or unwilling to resolve the Sphinx’s obscured features as African, the 1901 Werner’s frontispiece positions its elocutionist readers as knowledgeable and appreciative connoisseurs of “finely characteristic” racial differences. Aptly so, since expressive racial and ethnic differences formed no insignificant part of the late nineteenth-century elocutionist’s professional stock-in-trade; racial expression is a cultural capital that the following essay both recognizes and mines in its catalog of African American performers. What remains incoherent in this disciplinary formation, however—what still riddles in this sphinx, what Werner’s both identifies with and disavows in its sketch of black “expression”—are the relationships among body, performance, and identity in elocution’s ideal of “expressional power.” Like the elocutionary readers that reprinted the Davidson sisters’ poems along with instructions for their recitation by other aspiring young women in the first half of the century, elocution as an aspiring profession at the turn of the century revolved around its paradoxical promise to deliver spontaneous vocal expression out of tutored bodily performance. Turning that paradox into a form of cultural capital under professional regulation became elocution’s disciplinary ambition; by 1900, however, elocution’s emblematic figure for that paradox was no longer the lyrical young lady poetess of the 1830s and 1840s but the expressive African American body. In its most unapologetically racist declarations, elocutionism conceived of African Americans as reservoirs of purely spontaneous, untutored expressive power, folding into its theory of “expressional power” along the way discourses of popular minstrelsy as well as romantic racialism. As journalist, advice columnist, and later feminist Dorothy Dix put it in Werner’s in 1902, “The typical darky”—by contrast with “the semi-educated negro of this generation”—“must be understood as being a creature whose nature has not been ‘shut in’ by the tradition of civilization and education; he is emotional and free to express that emotion; quickly and genuinely responsive to the slightest changes of mood. . . . The typical negro uses the same abandon in body as he does in voice, and is therefore essentially dramatic.”60 Where antebellum liberal romantic racialism held that African Americans’ access to spontaneous feeling made them natural Christians, Dix reads them with the same racialist emphasis, but through her professional lens, as natural elocutionists.61 To create demand for their professional services, however, elocutionists needed to charge money for teaching and performing what came so freely, in Dix’s ambivalent view, to African Americans—to market elocutionists as professional expert managers of natural “expressional power.” That professional expertise took the form of cultural media-

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tion: what elocution offered its students by the later nineteenth century was a trained facility in speech that openly incorporated linguistic diversity, rather than the uniform polite speech of the earlier Anglo-American elocutionary readers.62 (Whatever fine distinctions young ladies were instructed to draw in their recitation of Lucretia Davidson’s and Margaret Miller Davidson’s poems by the elocutionary readers of the 1840s, broad differences of race, class, and ethnicity were not among them.) The elocution professional on Werner’s turn-of-the-century model performs and teaches pieces like “Mar Ellen Attends a School of Elocution,” advertised as a tale of “Irish dialect prose,” which represents an immigrant daughter’s educational and linguistic aspirations through her mother’s “dialect” monologue about “electrocution school.”63 To borrow Carrie Bramen’s terms, turn-of-the-century elocution provided “spectacles of Americanization,” offering simultaneously techniques for whitening immigrants’ speech and for representing its original “savor” on the platform or in the classroom.64 Werner’s immensely heterogeneous range of anthology recitation pieces, including Frances Harper—its utterly indiscriminate pedagogical canon, by comparison with that of the 1900 Modern Language Association or even the 2000 Heath Anthology of American Literature—reflects elocution’s tacit disciplinary promise to alienate every speaker’s original language from her and return it, amplified by other languages, through the verbal and bodily routines of elocutionary performance.65 The question, of course, is to what ends elocution recruited a pedagogical canon so diverse (in present-day honorific terms) with respect to race, class, ethnicity, and gender. Werner’s first motive must be understood to have been professional assertion. The diversity of elocution’s canon in its pages is not apart from but of a piece with the magazine’s other professional features, its notices of elocutionist conventions and its editorials fretting about why high schools and colleges that “pay professors of science and letters from $1000 to $4000 a year, engage a teacher of elocution at from $200 to $800.” Moreover, elocution, despite its more catholic canon, shared many of the anxieties expressed by the professors of vernacular literatures, including anxieties over their discipline’s feminization; the same editorial complaining of elocutionists’ pay next to that of professors of letters claims that “90 per cent” of the nation’s teachers of oratory are women and forecasts, “No large or permanent place will be given to the oratorical profession until it develops more fully the stern and dignified”—and presumably more masculine—“air characteristic of real oratory.” Elocution laid claim to its more diverse pedagogical canon not because its practitioners altruistically rose above the professional strivings of the Modern Language Association but because the terms of its professional competition with

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literary studies—a competition it eventually lost in higher education— all but compelled it to do so.66 By comparison with the professors of literature (at least as ideally conceived by the Modern Language Association), turn-of-the-century elocutionists, as the Werner’s catalog of African Americans “active in expressional art” suggests, practiced a heterogeneous set of skills in heterogeneous social locations, from colleges and universities to smalltown lecture halls. As public oratorical culture declined in prestige in the United States and high print literary culture became more separate from popular entertainment,67 elocutionists sought not only to offer linguistic makeovers to immigrants, African Americans, and others whose embodied language separated them from genteel white middle-class culture but also to professionalize an embattled middling space of popular literary performance that included African American performers as well as blackface traditions. Even in its most abstract formulations, elocution remained tied to the marked body of performance. Elocution’s most ambitious theorists claimed that their discipline, unlike literary studies, involved the entire person, body and mind, in learning, and cited turn-of-the-century philosophical pragmatism as well as progressive theories of education in support of their views. A writer in the 1901 Werner’s, for example, quoted William James—“An impression which simply flows in at the pupil’s eyes and ears, and in no way modifies the active life, is an impression gone to waste”—in support of his contention that “An intelligent reading of a work is worth more than a week’s talk about it,” in other words, that elocutionary performance excelled over disembodied discursive literary analysis as a mode of learning.68 It was from this position of professional assertion and competition that elocution, unlike the early Modern Language Association, was motivated to see and catalog the varieties of African American “expressional art,” including Frances Harper’s career, at the turn of the century. Elocution’s professional investment in linguistic variety belongs to what Carrie Bramen labels the broader “discourse of heterogeneity” in the turn-of-the-century United States, part of “a creative response to modernization, which was at times full of radical potential and at other times deeply reactionary” (The Uses of Variety, 20–21). In its reactionary mode, Werner’s figured African Americans as “passive” vessels of their own innate expressional power, “passively the slave for over two centuries” under slavery’s benign shelter and docile under Reconstruction’s generous efforts to make them over “hand, heart, and head” (“Expressional Power of the Colored Race,” 459–60)—by implication the animal and childlike half of elocution’s Sphinx to the white professional expert’s human half. In its progressive mode, however, Werner’s tacitly acknowledged that the face of the Sphinx was African American:

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the work of Frances E. W. Harper and other African Americans in mediating between vernaculars and cultures belonged not at the disciplinary margins of turn-of-the-century elocution but at its core. It would take literary studies as a profession in the United States roughly another ninety years to acknowledge as much.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Plied from Nought to Nought”: Helen Hunt Jackson and the Field of Emily Dickinson’s Refusals

“Both residual and emergent”: borrowing its terms from Raymond Williams, Domhnall Mitchell’s recent characterization of Emily Dickinson at once names the long-felt difficulty of placing Dickinson in standard literary-historical narratives and gestures toward an emerging consensus about how to cope with that difficulty.1 Dickinson’s “conception of the artist,” Mitchell suggests, was residual inasmuch as her writing practices throughout her life harked back to those of middle-class American women in the early nineteenth century; Dickinson began in the 1830s, and remained to her death in 1886 “the amateur gentlewoman writer of handwritten and unpublished manuscripts, . . . circulated privately as gifts among people of her own ethnic and class background.” Dickinson’s self-understanding as a poet was emergent, on the other hand, in her leaning toward what Mitchell calls the “the purely formal, self-referring aspects” of her linguistic craft, her investment in an emergent modern, and ultimately modernist, vocational ideal of art for art’s sake—the ideal of artistic autonomy, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms.2 This division between residual and emergent understandings of her authorship, which Mitchell convincingly ascribes to Dickinson’s own consciousness, was amplified for her eventual readers by the historical gap, of thirty years or more for most of her poems, between Dickinson’s writing of her poems and their posthumous entry into the realm of print. When the first volumes of her poetry began to appear in print in the 1890s, they immediately found many readers prepared, as they might not have been during the 1860s—the most productive years of Dickinson’s writerly life—to read a woman poet through this emergent modernist aesthetic.3 Dickinson entered the periodizing classifications of literary history, then, rather as Sarah Bernhardt was said to have descended a spiral staircase: “she stood still and it revolved about her.”4 If Dickinson without fundamentally altering her own social location or writing practices nevertheless—by standing still—passed from residual to emergent forms of writing over the course of her life’s work as a privately circulated poet and her afterlife in print, her Amherst contemporary and girlhood friend, Helen Hunt Jackson, would seem to have

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spent her career in the sunlight of dominant literary taste, only to be eclipsed after her death. The biographical comparisons, contrasts, and contacts between the two poets are by now familiar, indeed almost inevitable, but worth rehearsing. Emily Dickinson as a poet remained almost unpublished in her lifetime, whereas Helen Hunt Jackson published widely as a poet as well as in other genres, in newspapers, prestigious journals like the Atlantic Monthly and Scribner’s, and in book form, beginning with the volume of her Verses brought out by Fields, Osgood & Company in 1870 and continuing through her death and beyond. At some point in her life, Dickinson may have desired publication in exactly the respectable middlebrow and highbrow literary venues in which Jackson achieved it; in 1862, she reached out to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a writer and editor associated with the Atlantic Monthly, asking him in a letter that would later become famous if he could tell her whether her verse was “alive.”5 Higginson discouraged Dickinson’s hopes for publication, finding her verse more unconventional than he could quite stomach; but he remained Dickinson’s correspondent throughout her life, visited her in Amherst, and collaborated with Mabel Loomis Todd—at first reluctantly, then with greater enthusiasm—in editing and publishing Dickinson’s poems after her death. By contrast with his ambivalence toward Dickinson’s poetry, Higginson was Helen Hunt Jackson’s enthusiastic public booster from almost the moment they met in 1866, calling Jackson “the woman who has come nearest in our day and tongue to the genius of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”6 Similarly, Josiah Holland, founding editor of Scribner’s from 1870 to his death in 1881, barely noticed Dickinson’s poetry during her lifetime, even though he knew her personally and despite Dickinson’s extensive and intimate correspondence with his wife, Elizabeth; and yet Holland coveted Jackson’s poetry for Scribner’s, to the point of wishing he could publish an entire number devoted to Jackson’s writing.7 It was Higginson who in the 1860s introduced Jackson to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, apparently by showing her a portfolio of Dickinson’s poems he had compiled over the course of their correspondence. At some point the two women initiated a correspondence in which Jackson urged Dickinson to publish, telling her that “it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud”; Dickinson by this time in her life refused to be moved, even after Jackson managed to smuggle one of Dickinson’s poems into the No-Name Series volume A Masque of Poets (1878), an anthology of anonymous poetry by famous writers.8 The rest is literary history: Dickinson’s poems became a sensation after her death, while Jackson’s receded into obscurity as one dominant taste gave way to another. More recently, however, scholars of nineteenth-century American lit-

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erature have revisited the relationship between Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson in terms that credit Jackson with much more resistance to cultural norms and view Dickinson’s posthumous canonization with correspondingly greater skepticism. Departing from earlier feminist celebrations of Dickinson as the lonely, pathbreaking heroine of American women’s letters, these readers point out that Jackson, although raised in class circumstances close to Dickinson’s (her father was a professor at Amherst College), became a professional woman writer who supported herself by her pen after her first husband’s death, whereas Dickinson remained to her death “the amateur gentlewoman writer,” in Mitchell’s words, whose class privilege—her father’s comfortable income as a lawyer—allowed her to concentrate on the selfreferential pleasures of her writing. Jackson enjoyed a thoroughly professional literary career; indeed, she is frequently cited as a central example in studies of women’s emerging professionalism in the literary marketplace.9 By contrast, it was exactly because she did not have to make a living, Mitchell and others argue, that Dickinson could invest in a formal, protomodernist ideal of autonomous linguistic art. Dickinson’s devotion to a high-cultural ideal of art for art’s sake stands out all the more strongly, in such recent criticism, against the kind of socially engaged writing that has been “recovered” for the American literary canon in the past two decades. Joanne Dobson, for example, anticipated Domhnall Mitchell’s simultaneously residual and emergent Dickinson in her 1989 portrait of a Dickinson “stylistically ahead of her time” and protomodernist in her existential themes but at the same time “permeated with the lively, sentimental, even grotesque images of popular nineteenth-century American culture.” Nevertheless, for Dobson, Dickinson’s “lack of public reference” is all the more striking “at a time when the strongest and the freest voices of women writers were heard on issues germane to the structure and needs of society as a whole”—issues such as slavery, labor abuses, and women’s rights.10 Helen Hunt Jackson, unlike Dickinson, did turn to this sort of socially engaged writing late in her career: when she is not read through the historical narrative of women’s literary professionalism, she is best remembered today for her novel Ramona (1884), an impassioned plea for attention to the oppression of Native Americans at the hands of the United States government. Dobson’s study of Dickinson thus points directly to Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills,” as evidence that “there exists in nineteenth-century American women’s novels a powerful tradition of social realism and advocacy for Indians, blacks, and the working poor” (81), a tradition from which Dickinson held herself aloof. Mitchell contrasts Dickinson with a strik-

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ingly similar list of compatriots—“the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Helen Hunt Jackson”—and along with Dobson, Mitchell concludes that Dickinson, unlike them, “works at some remove from the world of politics” (249). Drawing explicitly on Pierre Bourdieu’s language of the cultural field, Mitchell suggests that Dickinson’s characteristic relationship to the social world, especially the worlds of politics and economics, is one of refusal or denial. And yet, as Mitchell usefully insists, “even refusal can be thought of as a form of relation, a social stance. The problem is how to recover the historical context that can help us better to appreciate the possible significance of that negation” (2).11 Betsy Erkkila’s list of Dickinson’s more socially minded artistic contemporaries overlaps conspicuously with those of Mitchell and Dobson, although Erkkila, unlike Mitchell and Dobson, barely hesitates in naming the political significance of Dickinson’s negations: “Whereas Fredrick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, and many of the women writers of her age, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Jacobs, embraced the democratic language of republican ideology even as they turned that language to a critique of the actual practice of the American government, Dickinson returned to a pre-Revolutionary and aristocratic language of rank, titles, and divine right to assert the sovereignty of her self as absolute monarch.”12 In light of Dickinson’s disconnection from “the struggles of blacks, women, and workers that marked her time,” Erkkila calls upon feminist critics to ask whether Dickinson’s exaltation of her own desiring sovereignty may not in fact be “the base for the reinscription of the imperial axioms of the ruling class on the backs of racial and class ‘others’?” (52). Whatever the rhetorical status of Erkkila’s final question mark, there would seem to be no going back from such readings to earlier views of Dickinson as lonely feminist culture heroine, and I do not exactly propose here to argue a way back. What I do propose, however, is that the contexts in which these readings place Dickinson are incomplete, and incomplete in ways that oddly make Dickinson the scapegoat for the political effects of the literary field as a whole.13 It is notable that the lists of socially engaged writers set against Dickinson’s disengagement are dominated by writers of fiction or autobiographical prose; as we have already seen, the “recovery” movement in American literary studies has distinctly privileged what Bourdieu would call “social art” and especially the social novel.14 It is also notable that these comparisons tend to remain where they begin, at the level of the list rather than at the level of sustained conversations among literary works.15 Finally, it is notable that within the format of the list, Helen Hunt Jackson ap-

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pears as the author of Ramona (explicitly in Dobson’s list, implicitly in Mitchell’s) rather than as a poet;16 again, a relational politics of literary genres or the literary field as a whole tends to drop out of this argument at its every scale, even when it represents the career of a writer like Jackson who published in several genres. How, then, to restore a more relational sense of the politics of literary genres in the relationship between Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson? To look at Jackson in light of Bourdieu’s bird’s-eye view of the literary field as a whole is to see her as moving during the course of her career from one pole of the field to another—from what Bourdieu would call “bourgeois art” to “social art”—all the while sustaining her identity (the identity that sustained her economically) as a literary professional. These poles for Jackson were strongly and predictably aligned with literary genre through the trajectory of her career, starting from poetry as high bourgeois art and moving with Ramona to the novel as social art through the intermediate territory of the Saxe Holm stories and her travel writing. Jackson’s career trajectory maps out with exemplary completeness the cultural possibles for American women’s writing circa 1865, and in doing so it maps out the complementary and intimately opposed terrain of what Bourdieu would call the field of Dickinson’s refusals. In Bourdieu’s analysis, the autonomous position of “art for art’s sake” emerges in a place of tension, an “unstable” equilibrium, “between the two poles of ‘bourgeois art’ and ‘social art.’ ” This autonomous art world defines itself in the second half of the nineteenth century by a double refusal: of the official honors, fame, and financial success attached to bourgeois art, on the one hand, and of social art’s “demand that literature fulfil a social or political function,” on the other.17 Enabled by class privilege as well as by her own talents, Dickinson homed in on the tense place between, while Jackson’s peripatetic professional career articulated the poles. Bourdieu’s categories are, of course, exogenous in respect to American literature. And yet Dickinson and Jackson could both have found a contemporary indigenous mapping of the post–Civil War American literary field in very nearly Bourdieu’s terms, if not from his political perspective—as well as a pointed prescription for women’s roles in that field— no further away than in the poetry of their friend, neighbor, and sometime editor, Josiah Holland. Holland’s widely popular book-length poem of 1867, Kathrina, anatomized the literary field through the semiautobiographical tale of an ambitious young man of letters, Paul, whose poetic vocation is tested and ultimately purified by his marriage to the devout and altruistic Kathrina (modeled on Holland’s beloved wife and Dickinson’s close friend, Elizabeth Holland).18 Through Paul, Holland

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tests and eventually declares wanting the art world’s claims to disinterested aesthetic autonomy. Through Kathrina and her role in Paul’s personal and artistic redemption, Holland tests the alternative claims of social art and ultimately proposes an updated version of earlier nineteenth-century True Womanhood as his wishful solution to the tensions of cultural hierarchy. Testing and rejecting high-cultural aspirations to autonomous literary art, Kathrina at the same time distinguishes itself from more directly political forms of social art (acknowledged but neutralized in Kathrina’s abstract Christian benevolence), as well as from truly mass-cultural, “industrial” art (distanced by the poem’s sheer length as well as its blank verse, elevated diction, and allusiveness). In Bourdieu’s terms again, Kathrina positions itself in a middlebrow region of bourgeois art exactly by its refusals and transformations of adjacent positions in the cultural field. Kathrina’s gendered anatomy of American literary culture is strikingly if indirectly suggestive for understanding the situations of Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson—both women personally known to Holland, both determined to be authors in their own right rather than redeemers of male poets. As Holland himself was well aware, women writers were among his keenest competitors for Kathrina’s middlebrow cultural space; never directly acknowledged in Kathrina, this competition, the poem’s prehistory suggests, was nevertheless central to its motivation. Some considerable part of the impetus for Holland’s ambitious poem apparently came from his reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh—Dickinson’s favorite work by one of her favorite woman poets and the poet to whom Higginson compared Helen Hunt Jackson. It was probably Holland’s reading of Aurora Leigh that stimulated him in the summer of 1858 to write an (unsigned) essay for the Springfield Republican titled “Women in Literature,” an essay containing the germ of the later Kathrina. “Women in Literature” acknowledges women’s literary emergence as a transatlantic phenomenon and cites Dickinson’s favorite authors in observing that “on the other side of the water, Mrs. Browning talks poetry like one inspired,” while “[t]he authoress of ‘Jane Eyre’ has left to us a notable testimony to the genius of women.”19 Despite these testimonials to female genius, the essay’s aim is to usher women writers to their clearly inferior place in the cultural hierarchy— indeed, to fix gender as the ruling principle of cultural hierarchy. Holland cheerfully draws on the work of “female genius” to serve his own argumentative ends here; his declaration that women are drawn to personal and subjective matters rather than to general human truths repeats almost word for word Romney Leigh’s charge to Aurora that women “generalise / Oh, nothing,—not even grief!”20 “From the mas-

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culine mind,” according to Holland, “proceed generalizations, classifications, systems; from the feminine, experiences, adaptations of truth to special purposes, and fancies.” Women’s merely “personal and passionate” perspective (Romney’s words, in AL II.221) debars them, Holland and Romney agree, from entering upon what Holland calls a “permanent place in literature.” On the other hand, Holland goes on to argue, women’s sentimental personalism exactly fits them to the station just “below” literary mastery, managing the interface between the domestic hearth and the culture industry, where production directly meets consumption: “Here woman is at home. As she deals out bread to her household for daily food, so she may deal out her thoughts for the daily food of a multitude of minds. The mass of literature is ephemeral, by necessity. The magazine and the newspaper, the story and the poem— read today, destroyed tomorrow—these are the food of the world, and in this field woman may win, and is winning, the fairest laurels.” Holland’s sanctimonious rendering of mass culture as woman hardly conceals the glaring fact that the “ephemeral” cultural work described here as woman’s is his own.21 The very medium in which he insists on the “radical difference between the productions of men and women,” after all, is the daily newspaper of his own editing; he is forced to admit that “the two classes of mind are . . . constantly crossing each other’s lines.” As a self-made provincial man of letters, son of a “perennially unsuccessful inventor and machinist” who was unable to send him to college,22 Holland lacked the economic and cultural resources that might have kept him from the quotidian, market-driven literary labors that his essay defensively codes as feminine. Holland thus had every personal motive for trying to rewrite cultural hierarchy in terms of the apparently more stable binarism of gender, but also every reason in 1858 for feeling how precarious was his own middlebrow literary masculinity, poised between the emergent high-art sphere then being codified in the new Atlantic Monthly and women’s genteel scribbling on the other.23 If his reading of Aurora Leigh on one level provoked Holland into reasserting literary greatness as the essential prerogative of “masculine minds,” on another level it compelled him to acknowledge that the demands of the burgeoning literary marketplace produced “feminine men and masculine women in literature, as in life.” When Holland returned to these issues in Kathrina, it was once again by crossing lines with Aurora Leigh. The resemblance between the two poems was not lost on contemporary readers; the New Englander and Yale Review, for example, in its respectful notice, observed that Kathrina “is a metrical tale, or novel in verse, somewhat like Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh,’ or Tennyson’s ‘Princess,’ in the attempt of the author to unite in one the characteristics of a novel with the higher

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qualities of poetry.”24 Like Aurora Leigh and Wordsworth’s Prelude (the latter a comparison overlooked by Holland’s contemporary reviewers), Kathrina is a blank verse tale of the growth of a poet’s mind, told in the first person. Like Aurora Leigh, Kathrina centers on a romantic couple who vigorously debate the claims of human social needs versus those of autonomous high art over the course of their relationship. As in Aurora Leigh, one member of the couple becomes a famous poet while the other partner remains skeptical of such poetry’s redeeming social value; both poems end in a vision of heaven reconciling not only the romantic couple but also their theories of art. Kathrina, however, firmly normalizes Barrett Browning’s more audacious plot, in the first instance by reversing Aurora Leigh’s feminist gendering of the debate: where Barrett Browning assigns the claims of autonomous high art to Aurora and those of social action to Romney, Holland grants high artistic ambition to the male partner in his romantic couple, Paul, leaving his heroine Kathrina to speak for art’s responsibility to the greater social good. And in thus reconventionalizing the gender roles of Kathrina’s romantic culture wars, Holland simultaneously evacuates Aurora Leigh’s active sense of class struggle (however conservatively that struggle is resolved by Barrett Browning) from the social side of the couple’s debate, making his heroine the voice of a feminine Christian charity at once too sentimentally particular and too abstractly general to pause for such earthly differences. Holland’s young protagonist first comes to know himself “Baptized and set apart to poetry” in an episode that obtrusively condenses the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime with Christian imagery: where young Wordsworth in the Prelude stole a boat, the boy Paul mischievously unleashes a lamb, chases it to a mountaintop, and there has a vision in which he apprehends both nature’s “valley hollowed to its heavenkissed lip” below him and the fact of his own imaginative power, “greater than the scene”—the power “to choose and to combine, / And build from that within me and without / New forms of life, with meaning of my own” (30–31). Heeding the egotistical side of this vision, Paul (like his biblical namesake) remains blind to the Christian import of the lamb’s role in it; soon, however, he comes to know and love a young woman, Kathrina, who will act out the lamb’s role for him in cultural, as well as emotional and religious, terms. Evidently cultured herself, Kathrina reads but does not write poetry (94–95). In Paul’s wondering eyes, she moves graciously between the good old-time Congregationalist prayer meetings of the Connecticut River valley, “the old creed / Of puritan New England” (78), and cultured “society / Of gentle men and women” (82). As Paul eventually learns, “She had been bred to luxury” (123) but moved to the country

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when her father lost his fortune and died. Kathrina’s class fall forms her as the poem’s ideal mediator—of cultural hierarchy, and between religion and culture. In Kathrina’s view, which she stakes out at length in debate with Paul, all art is both mediate and mediating. Cultural hierarchy begins with God, who “inspires the poet’s soul” (100), and continues downward through poets and artists themselves, to teachers and critics, to the masses below them. As she tells Paul, “You [the poets] take it at first hands, / And we from yours: the multitude from ours” (104). Like Romney Leigh, although for nearly opposite motives, Paul vehemently objects to Kathrina’s theology of art as both mediate and requiring mediation. Romney scorns Aurora’s vocation on the grounds that “nature sings itself, / And needs no mediate poet, lute or voice, / To make it vocal” (AL II.1205–7); the cry of the orphans, he believes, should resound directly in listening human ears.25 Unlike Romney, Paul has no interest in the cries of hungry orphans; he rejects the ideal of the “mediate poet” in order to demand a more autonomous conception of the poet’s role than Kathrina offers to him. In her theology, Paul complains, the poet is only a godly “mouth-piece”: You make him but the spigot of a cask Round which you, teachers, wait with silver cups To bear away the wine that leaves it dry. (103) Paul objects both to being thought inspired by God and to being interpreted for his readership; poetry, he claims, “speaks [the multitude’s] vernacular” directly and therefore should not need priestly “middlemen” (106). The moral of the poem’s courtship story for Paul, though, is that of Holland’s essay “Women in Literature” (1858): the middleman is more acceptable in the shape of a woman. Kathrina’s reply to Paul exalts her vocation as mediator of cultural hierarchy in terms taken directly from the earlier essay: “Yet the fact Still stands untouched,” she added, thoughtfully, “That greatest artists speak to fewest souls, Or speak to them directly. They have need Of no such ministry as waits the beck Of the composer; but they need the life, If not the learning, of the cultured few Who understand them. . . . . . . The bread that comes from heaven

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Needs finest breaking. Some there doubtless are— Some ready souls—that take the morsel pure Divided to their need; but multitudes Must have it in admixtures, menstruums, And forms that human hands or human life Have moulded. . . .” (107–8) What Kathrina offers Paul, could he only hear it, is a way of magically holding together a cultural field increasingly divided. Christlike, she will incarnate his poetic word in a form broken down for mass edibility, provided that he in his turn properly acknowledge his own intermediary, rather than fully autonomous, place in culture’s great chain of being—answerable both to God and to his fellow human beings. Unready to accept this message in its entirety, Paul is nevertheless more than ready to marry Kathrina. Domestic bliss blunts his poetic ambitions for a time, but its fading into the light of common day rededicates him to the pursuit of poetic fame, “that grows thereby / To be its own immortal monument, / Outlasting all the marble and the bronze” (180–81). Kathrina demurs from her husband’s Horatian lust for literary fame as a self-referentially autonomous good, hoping to win him to her own vision of a generalized Christian social art that would seek “To honor God, to benefit mankind, / To serve with lofty gifts the lowly needs / Of the poor race for which the God-man died” (185). Biding her time, however, she becomes Paul’s muse and critic in his poem’s composition; indeed, it is her benevolently disinterested ear, rather than her husband’s suspect desire for fame, that seems to call his poem’s most purely aesthetic pleasures—its “mighty pinions,” “labyrinthine harmonies,” and “silver clouds of sound” (199)—into being. Kathrina’s vindication comes when her husband’s “labored volume,” at last delivered to the press, becomes exactly the success he wished for and in exactly the terms he wished for. Its first reviewer praises it specifically for attempting and achieving high-cultural aesthetic autonomy as defined over and against social art. The author of this poem, the reviewer declares, has said to the world “Look you! This is my thought; and it shall stand alone. It has no moral, bears no ministry Of pious teaching, and makes no appeal To sufferance or suffrage of the muffs Who, in the pulpit or the press, prepare The nation’s pap. The fiery-footed barb [sic; pard?] That pounds the pampas, and the lily-bells

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That hang above the brooks, present the world With no apology of being there, And no attempt to justify themselves In uselessness. It is enough for God That they are beautiful, and hold his thought In fine embodiment; and it shall be Enough for me that, in this book of mine, I have created so[m]ewhat that is strong And beautiful, which, if it profit—well: If not, ’tis no less strong and beautiful, And holds its being by no feebler right.” (206–7) Kathrina’s reaction, however, to what she contemptuously calls the reviewer’s “puff” (209) speaks the poet’s own misgivings about discovering his book to be “in the market now,” trumpeted “with adjectives / My daring publisher had filched, I think, / From an old circusbroadside” (203). In Kathrina’s eyes, even the restricted marketplace of artistic esteem, what Paul calls “the guild / In which I claim a place,” is just another market, unable to sustain its own claims to disinterestedness; aesthetic autonomy, she implies, is no more than guild solidarity misrecognizing itself and successfully marketing that misrecognition in a print world saturated with competing conceptions of culture. Convinced of this much of his wife’s truth by ten years of increasingly sterile effort as a popular and critical success, Paul decides to turn his back on his guild and his public alike in order to dedicate himself once more to the pursuit of pure art, really and purely and finally disinterested art, detached as he hopes from any market and any utility. Like Aurora Leigh, Paul renounces his first poetic successes; but like Aurora in these moments, he still does not fully understand the reasons for his dissatisfaction.26 “I confess my sins against my art, and so, henceforth, / As to my goddess, give myself to her,” Paul tells Kathrina (223), despite her warnings that this love will be in the end a self-mystified idolatry, an artist’s worship of “His creature, made his God” (225)— perhaps an idol of the cave rather than the market this time, but an idol just the same. “All gifts of men / Were made for use, and made for highest use,” she advises him. A pragmatist (at least for some purposes of her argument) avant la lettre, Kathrina declares art’s best uses to be “God’s regal truth” as “verified by life” (226), and points out with impeccable antiessentialist logic that Paul’s art-goddess is a historically contingent creature of “men’s opinions, braced by usages”: “The thing which you call art, Is anything but definite in form,

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Or fixed in law. It has as many shapes As worshippers. . . . [Like art,] politics has a history, And therefore has a being,—has, in truth, Just such a being as I grant to art— A being of opinions. . . . There is no fixedness Or form of politics for all mankind; And there is none of art.” (228–29) Once again, however, Paul will not heed Kathrina. He plunges headlong into a final effort to release into language “the forms / That sleep imprisoned in the snowy arms / Of still unquarried truth” (238) and at last “broach[es] the Infinite” (240), only to rediscover in the failure of this effort, but in a different register of value, what he first discovered in the aftermath of his first poetic success: that his art is always (already and finally) on the market. I learned Where language finds its bound,—learned that beyond The range of human commerce, save by force, It never moves, nor lingers in the realm It thus invades, a moment, if the voice Of human commerce speak not the demand;— That language is a thing of use;—that thought Which seeks a revelation, first must seek Adjustment in the scale of human need, Or find no fitting vehicle. (246–47) Attempting and failing the sublime, Paul finally arrives at an idealized poetics of the literary marketplace. In this poetics, the foundation of all linguistic acts is the “adjustment” of “revelation” to “human need,” which is to say here, market demand: recalling Josiah Holland’s dual career as an author and editor, we might call Paul’s revelation a poetics of editing, one that represents as primary, generative, and ethical, rather than secondary, derivative, and self-interested, the editor’s mediating role between literary revelation and literary commerce, production and consumption. Through Kathrina, then, Paul comes to embrace a market-driven version of the social aim Romney declares to Aurora—“To draw my uses to cohere with needs / And bring the uneven world back to its round” (AL II.1218–19). But in Paul’s discovery of language as use, what gets

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used up is Kathrina. Paul’s idolatrous quest for artistic “embodiment” (241) implicitly consumes his wife’s body. When Paul rises from his final perusal of his last poetic attempt, “The faintness and the chill, which overwhelmed / My disappointed heart” at the “cold, unmeaning ugliness” of his own words (245), finds its immediate opposite and yet its ultimate counterpart in his wife’s consumptive body, sinking every night “hotter hectic, to her welcome bed” (248) and, soon, to death. Getting used up, though, was always Kathrina’s mediating function, the logical consequence of her self-declared mission to bear the word in embodied form between the elite male artist and his mass audience.27 Her consumptive death literalizes the fate of the “ephemeral” cultural bread that women deal out in Holland’s essay “Women in Literature”; like that fare, Kathrina is “read today, destroyed tomorrow.” The sacrifice of Kathrina’s body, at once Marian and Christlike, imaginatively reunites the poet both with his dead mother in heaven and with his popular audience on earth. Keeping vigil at Kathrina’s deathbed, the poet, feeling a “Strange apprehension of a mighty change,” finds himself hailed “in the ear of memory” (266) by his mother’s voice, which both recalls for him his first, Wordsworthian moment of vocation with the lamb on the mountain (266) and points out for the poet the lamb he is about to lose, his wife (267). Kathrina then wakes and shares with Paul her vision of the city of God—“I caught the sheen of multitudes, and heard / Voices that called and answered from afar / Through spaces inconceivable” (268). Like Aurora Leigh for the blind Romney, Kathrina must see heaven for the spiritually blind Paul—but like “mulcted” Romney, only more so, it is Kathrina who pays the bodily price for bringing this vision into being. Finally brought to the point of conversion, Paul offers himself to Jesus Christ to be “use[d] as thy willing instrument,” at which “Multitudes, it seemed, / Responded with ‘Amen!’ as if the word / Were caught from mortal lips by swooping choirs” (282). Kathrina then dies; but Paul, having fully accepted her theology of art as mediation, now lives to bear her word to the thirsty multitude. Multitudes, it seems, did in fact respond “Amen” to Holland’s attempt to suture the opening chasms of post–Civil War American cultural hierarchies through an antebellum conversion narrative centered upon the sacrifices of True Womanhood. Kathrina’s at once nostalgic and forward-looking grafting of residual upon emergent narratives went through fifty printings in three years (including at least one London edition), was brought out in 1868 in a lavishly illustrated holiday gift edition, and was still being reprinted in the 1890s. The more severe high-cultural literary taste of the Atlantic Monthly, on the other hand, made fun of Kathrina at length as “puerile in conception, destitute of due motive, and crude and inartistic in treatment,” even while conced-

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ing that “we accept fully his theory of letters and of life.”28 Unable to dispute the “theory” of Holland’s wishful mediation of cultural hierarchy, the Atlantic reviewer put that hierarchy to rights by mocking the popularizing grossness of Holland’s poetic style—the classic taunt of the consecrated avant-garde against a too-visibly and systemically bourgeois, or petit bourgeois, art—in terms that may have touched on Holland’s class anxieties and pretensions as self-made man of letters, son of an itinerant machinist and himself an unsuccessful physician in early manhood.29 Sneering at Holland’s language of description in Kathrina, the Atlantic noted that “the landscape has usually some effect of drygoods to the poet’s eye. . . . Whatever [Holland’s fancy] touches it figures in gross material substance, preferably wood or some sort of upholstery.”30 As the Atlantic’s disdain indirectly testifies, Holland’s verse-novel successfully occupied exactly the cultural space whose genesis it narrated—the mediate, middlebrow space of an antifeminist Aurora Leigh, an orthodox Evangelical Prelude, of “high” British models broken down for American consumption on a more popular scale. Holland’s Kathrina figures nowhere, of course, on the lists of “socially engaged” writers and works against whom Emily Dickinson is now increasingly contrasted. Its absence is only one index of how consistently bourgeois art, in Bourdieu’s terms, is a missing category in moralizing readings of the nineteenth-century American literary field that divide the field in binary and all but allegorical terms between protomodernist “art for art’s sake” and committed progressive social art. Kathrina redundantly demonstrates what John Guillory and Mary Poovey have argued—that radical or subversive or oppositional politics, whether in contemporary nineteenth-century terms or those of our present day, cannot be ascribed to forgotten literary works from the simple fact of their having been forgotten and then proposed for recovery.31 And yet Kathrina also demonstrates in useful ways the close and contested proximity of bourgeois art to social art in the post–Civil War American literary field; indeed, the working-through of that proximity is the fundamental theme that Josiah Holland’s long poem shares with other postwar long poems like Lucy Larcom’s Idyl of Work (1875) and John Greenleaf Whittier’s The Tent on the Beach (1867).32 Holland’s approach to his theme in Kathrina is conservative next to Larcom’s or Whittier’s, but not without moments of (what may seem in our present view like) lucidity. If his post–Civil War heroine is openly regressive in her combination of antebellum womanly virtues with the most attractive features of the stern old-time religion, she seems strikingly prescient in her trenchant skepticism about the art world’s claims to disinterested autonomy. Through his deeply nostalgic and wishful representation of Kathrina, Holland achieved what Bourdieu would call a “partial objec-

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tification” of the cultural field that confronted him—and that confronted as well the women writers who competed with him. The Dickinson family library boasted an early-run copy of Kathrina along with several other works by Josiah Holland, quite probably presented by Holland himself.33 What Emily Dickinson thought of Kathrina’s rewriting of Aurora Leigh, if she read it at all, is not on record; nor is much else on record of her life and work in the immediate post– Civil War years. If the paucity of surviving manuscripts is any reliable guide, 1867 and early 1868 may have been poetically as well as emotionally bleak—or, more accurately perhaps, blank—years for her. The editor of her letters, Thomas H. Johnson, assigns only one to 1867—a suggestive two-line note to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “Bringing still my ‘plea for Culture,’ / Would it teach me now?”—and suggests that Dickinson may have been trying to renew with this note a correspondence that had lapsed since the end of the war.34 “A Plea for Culture,” Higginson’s essay in the January 1867 Atlantic Monthly,35 lamented the isolation Higginson saw as frustrating would-be American artists: “The true, great want is of an atmosphere of sympathy in intellectual aims. An artist can afford to be poor, but not to be companionless. . . . The man who is compelled by his constitution to view literature as an art is more lonely in America than even the painter or the sculptor; and he has no Italy for a refuge” (“Plea,” 33–34). Between Josiah Holland’s vigorously middlebrow mapping of American literary culture in Kathrina and Higginson’s more self-consciously elite “Plea,” Dickinson may well have felt lonely indeed by late 1867. Both men had by then made clear their disinclination to champion her poetry for publication. Dickinson could not have imagined herself for long as either partner in Holland’s picture of the poet’s redemptive marriage in Kathrina;36 her cryptic plea to Higginson dares him to recognize the loneliness in Amherst of a woman compelled by her constitution to view literature as an art. The poem she enclosed with her note to Higginson, “The Luxury to Apprehend” (Fr 819, first transcribed around 1864), at once illustrates and exceeds Higginson’s representation of the American writer’s hunger for “sympathy in intellectual aims.” And where Holland’s Kathrina would figure women’s role in culture as selflessly breaking down high art’s “bread of heaven” for mass consumption, Dickinson’s poem insists on the absolute and individual, rather than mass-mediating and massmediated, nature of her own desire: The Luxury to Apprehend The Luxury ’twould be To look at thee a single time

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An Epicure of me In whatsoever presence makes Till for a further food I scarcely recollect to starve So first I am supplied. The Luxury to meditate The Luxury it was To banquet on thy Countenance A sumptuousness supplies To plainer Days whose Table, far As Certainty can see Is laden with a single Crumb— The Consciousness of thee— (Fr 819E) However little Dickinson’s speaker actually eats in this poem, she cannot be imagined as masticating her food to nourish someone else; she neither “deals out bread to her household for daily food,” in Holland’s words, nor “deal[s] out her thoughts for the daily food of a multitude of minds” (“Women in Literature,” 4). The peculiar consubstantiality of the private eucharist imagined in this poem, its investment of Crumb with Consciousness, proleptically refuses Josiah Holland’s program in Kathrina for ameliorating American culture’s hierarchies with the sacrificial body of Woman.37 The miracle celebrated in this poem stands at the opposite remove from multiplying loaves and fishes to feed a masscultural multitude; Dickinson’s Consciousness, meditative rather than mediate, instead both magnifies and isolates its object, conferring upon its designated Crumb—and indirectly upon Higginson, addressee of this manuscript38 —the speaker’s own singularity and loneliness. Dickinson’s brief note, accompanied by this poem, reached Thomas Wentworth Higginson in July 1867 at Newport, Rhode Island, where he had made his year-round home after returning from the Civil War. If Dickinson was able to picture Higginson’s life in Newport while she read “A Plea for Culture” and addressed her plea to him in return, it could only have added to the ironies of her own plea for recognition in her artistic loneliness. Few lives could have been less “companionless” than Higginson’s in Newport, where he lived with his wife in the town’s most popular boardinghouse and where, in February 1866, he met a young widow, Helen Hunt, who was just beginning to publish her poetry. Higginson immediately recruited the lively Mrs. Hunt into Newport’s post–Civil War informal literary salon, whose members “spent their leisure time in various diversions, practising upon each other experiments in magnetism and enjoying picnics, sailing parties, and household soir´ees. . . . At one of them ‘Fanny Fern’ gave a talk on ‘Our

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Noses,’ and a nameless guest recited Mother Goose rimes in six languages.”39 Josiah Holland—along with fellow authors Bret Harte, Kate Field, and Louise Chandler Moulton, as well as the famous actress Charlotte Cushman—was among the many cultural celebrities who found their way to Higginson’s circle in the late 1860s. For Helen Hunt, entr´ee into Higginson’s social circle led directly to literary patronage: Higginson’s in the first place and, soon, Holland’s as well. So much for the loneliness of literary life in America in the summer that Dickinson brought her “plea” to Higginson. We are accustomed to reading Dickinson’s poetry—indeed, her writing and her life more generally—in terms of its committed refusal or distancing of the social. The hiatus between the conspicuous sociability of Higginson’s own life and his picture of the American artist languishing for “want of sympathy in intellectual aims” in “A Plea for Culture,” however, underlines how a certain lofty refusal of the social, a refusal at least in one direction, was emerging in the post–Civil War United States as a more general precondition or stance for elite art. Higginson’s lonely American writer is lonely in respect to the world of money, industry, and manly activity; the other face of that increasingly obligatory self-proclaimed loneliness, however, proclaims what Bourdieu calls “the invention of the artistic lifestyle,” those emergent forms of sociability enabled precisely by the later nineteenth century’s explosive growth in literary and cultural marketplaces.40 Higginson’s lively postwar Newport boardinghouse circle, assembled as it was of journalists, editors, and authors of fiction and poetry, as well as actresses and Civil War generals, illustrates the sheer range of cultural professions opening up in this expanded literary marketplace, as well as something of the “lifestyle” embraced by America’s increasingly diverse professional aristocracy of culture. Ebulliently gifted socially, Helen Hunt had no difficulty entering into Higginson’s Newport incarnation of the artistic lifestyle. She entered with just as much facility and professionalism into the other side of this sociability, the art world’s aristocratic refusal of the social. Her late poem “No Man’s Land,” published in Scribner’s in 1881, retrospectively maps the terrain Hunt successfully seized in the late 1860s. Unlike Holland’s Kathrina, which schematizes the social world in the familiar dichotomy of marriage at home and the marketplace beyond, and unlike Dickinson’s “Luxury,” which reduces the social world to the absolutist avowal of a single antinomian appetite, Jackson’s aesthetic refusal of the social in this poem extends to the refusal of desire and agency as such, both evacuated in the making of this landscape: Who called it so? What accident The wary phrase devised? What wandering fancy thither went,

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And lingered there surprised? Ah, no man’s land! oh, sweet estate, Illimitably fair! No measure, wall, or bar or gate, Secure as sky or air. No greed, no gain; not sold or bought, Unmarred by name or brand: Not dreamed of, nor desired, nor sought, Nor visioned, “no man’s land.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ah, “no man’s land,” hast thou a lover, Thy wild sweet charm who sees? The stars look down: the birds fly over, Art thou alone with these? Ah, “no man’s land,” when died thy lover, Who left no trace to tell? Thy secret we shall not discover, The centuries keep it well!41 From sociable Newport to no-man’s-land may seem a distance, but this secret, mysteriously uninhabited land is patently the land of literary art, envisioned as an ideally autonomous aristocratic “estate,” independent of commerce and its contagions. Defined from its title forward almost entirely by abstract negations or refusals (no measure, no wall; no name, no brand; no gain, no greed), “No Man’s Land” escapes the taunts leveled by the Atlantic at Josiah Holland’s middlebrow art in Kathrina; no reader of this poem could complain that “the landscape has usually some effect of dry-goods to the poet’s eye,” or that the poet’s “fancy” was given to figuring her world “in gross material substance, preferably wood or some sort of upholstery.” Published in Holland’s own Scribner’s, the poem testifies to Jackson’s success in rehearsing “the rules of art,” in Bourdieu’s phrase, that partly escaped Holland in his own poetic career.42 It also suggests that Jackson’s popular success in rehearsing these rules as a woman owed something to her willingness to compromise them with older formulas of womanhood, compromises Holland also had ventured to more conservative ends in Kathrina and that Dickinson more often would refuse: “No Man’s Land” modulates nineteenth-century middle-class women’s traditional “passionlessness” or mediated relation to desire into the agentless agency of the distinterested aesthetic.43 One literary-historical irony of “No Man’s Land,” of course, is that by 1881 Helen Hunt Jackson, after some fifteen years of publishing poetry under her initials “H. H.,” definitely had a salable “brand,” if

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not quite a full “name,” in the literary marketplace. Her mentor Higginson regarded the success of Jackson’s semianonymous branding with some wonder, noting, “However popular might be the poems of ‘H. H.,’ they were still attached to a rather vague and formless personality so long as those initials only were given” and worrying over whether this vagueness might have contributed to her comparative neglect in England. Like that of the earlier nineteenth-century British poetess L. E. L., Higginson observed, Jackson’s “name was in a manner nameless” in its coupling of household familiarity with abstraction; the “secret” of her authorship was one that any reasonably current reader of good journals and fiction was bound to uncover.44 Higginson’s uneasiness over Jackson’s publishing strategy both hit on and missed the point: what defined the successful “H. H.” brand, in poetry, was very much its coupling of familiarity and abstraction— exactly the character conveyed by those well-known initials, exactly the affect of “No Man’s Land.” Higginson at least partly understood this dual appeal, noting that Jackson intrigued Ralph Waldo Emerson with poems “the most condensed and the deepest, those having something of that kind of obscurity which Coleridge pronounced to be a compliment to the reader,” even while she “reache[d] the popular heart best in a class of poems easy to comprehend, thoroughly human in sympathy: poems of love, of motherhood, of bereavement.”45 Patently uneasy with this latter category of popularity, Higginson took pains to distinguish Jackson’s treatment of human sympathy from that of earlier nineteenthcentury women poets “who have exerted a similar power” but in a feebler register: “in the hands of a writer like Alice Cary, for instance, the influence is shallow, though pure and wholesome; she sounds no depths as this later poet sounds them” (“Helen Jackson,” 45). More than a decade after Jackson’s death, Grace B. Faxon would issue a strikingly symmetrical evaluation of her work but from a less elite position in the cultural field than Higginson’s, a position that yielded an opposite though equally uneasy judgment of Jackson’s literary appeal. Writing “Three Women Poets of New England” for her audience of elocution teachers and performers in Werner’s Magazine, Faxon acknowledged that “Mrs. Jackson’s poetry unquestionably takes rank above that of any American woman” (26); still, she found Jackson not “as near the people’s heart as her humbler sisters, Lucy Larcom and Celia Thaxter,” because Jackson “rarely wrote on lines of common human experience, but more usually expressed the emotions of exceptional and sensitive spirits.”46 Looking into the lambent mirror of Jackson’s “pure” poetry, Higginson and Faxon see, as it were, each other: Jackson’s poetry of sentiment shows the “popular heart” in its most deserving light to Higginson, while Faxon pays her half-willing tribute

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to the cultural aristocracy’s “exceptional and sensitive spirits” in recognizing not so much Jackson’s poetic superiority as the superior cultural authority of her champions. Higginson’s and Faxon’s mirroring evaluations specify with uncanny completeness the position from which Helen Hunt Jackson launched her career as a poet: on the disputed but potentially profitable borderline between bourgeois art and the Atlantic Monthly’s monopoly on the American consecrated avant-garde. Holland attempted the same territory at the same time when, in Kathrina, he set about enlisting Wordsworth and Barrett Browning for a modernized compromise between art and the remains of old-time evangelical piety—although Holland, as we have seen, found himself much more firmly repelled from the arena of consecrated high culture. Jackson attempted less and found greater acceptance; in her lyrics at once sentimental and “high,” she found a way of inhabiting the cultural rifts that Kathrina’s narrative less successfully tried to close. But even Higginson’s patronage could not secure reliable access to the Atlantic’s pages for Jackson’s poetry. Although she acknowledged the Atlantic’s greater prestige, over the years she turned away from its haughty editorship and modest pay scales to find more steady and remunerative outlets in Scribner’s and the New York Independent. Jackson captured her own ambiguous position in the cultural field perfectly in a well-known letter of 1883 to the Atlantic’s editor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “I consider part of the pay for an article in the Atlantic is always its being in the Atlantic—at the same time one must have some regard to one’s ‘market value.’ ”47 Until her decisive turn to social fiction and Indian activism with Ramona, Jackson managed her career in this disputed terrain, successfully maintaining an aura of modernizing—if not fully modernist—distinction around her popular poetry. Whether they found her poetry metrically perfect or rough, pretty or rugged, sentimentally feminine or rebarbatively intellectual, or all at once (as happened with some frequency), Jackson’s contemporaries consistently registered their awareness of this aura, an aura that depended on Jackson’s liminal position in the cultural field. Thus Higginson’s 1871 review of Verses found them rough because metrically perfect; her “studied conformity” to metrical regularity, he thought, was “bought at the expense of rugged lines and rather forced emphasis,” even while “there is often a sweetness of special cadences.” His concluding hydraulic metaphor reinterpreted this force as a deliberate strategy of distinction on Jackson’s part: “She has resolutely dammed up the stream here and there, to obtain a greater head of water; and it is a great thing to be thus secured against shallowness, though one may sometimes miss the ripple of the unchecked brook”—a calculated literary-industrial production of depth, Higginson

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implies, as against the shallows of more spontaneously lyric women singers.48 Scribner’s paid its tribute to Jackson’s aura of distinction in similarly divided although less formalist terms: “Mrs. Hunt, we think, is the first to show that a woman may set forth in verse in a distinctive manner, the inspiration of a high philosophy of life”—here coded male—“interfused with many of the feelings natural and peculiar to her sex.”49 The editor’s book column in the Galaxy rendered the usual praise for her poetry’s “finish and delicacy of sentiment” and coupled it, as usual, with mention of her poetry’s difficulty: “They are poems which require a good deal of attention, but this is because of the remote and unfamiliar way in which the subjects are often handled,” even though “the expression is, compared with most poets of the day, perfect.” Rather less kindly, foregrounding class privilege rather than gender politesse, the Galaxy poisoned its praise of Jackson’s “delicacy of sentiment” with the closing barb that “ ‘H. H’ includes in her range most human emotions—always with the limitation, if it be a limitation, that they are the emotions of the educated, the refined, and of those who are born so, rather than of those who obtain or ought to obtain both education and refinement against their wiles, like most of us”— “the emotions of the open, good, pure, unselfish, and refined, and not of the dark, morose, dreamy, determined, ambitious, and dangerous classes.”50 Strikingly, the divisions that emerged in Jackson’s contemporary reception around her aura of distinction repeat themselves, suitably transposed, in present-day feminist readings of her poetry. Conceding (what appears to us now as) Jackson’s primary nineteenth-century allegiances to popular forms of didacticism and sentiment, her present-day readers have nevertheless felt this aura of distinction and responded to it by projecting it forward in literary history—in terms parallel to but more modest than the claims made for the heroic protomodernist version of Dickinson. Elizabeth Petrino’s side-by-side reading of Jackson and Dickinson, for example, observes, “Many of Jackson’s Verses (1870) look forward to the imagistic concision and literary experimentation of early Modernist writers such as Amy Lowell and H. D.”51 Petrino echoes Dobson’s earlier conclusion: “If Jackson had been born thirty or forty years later, she might have made a fine Imagist poet,” and Cheryl Walker compares Jackson’s epigrammatic closing lines with those of the slightly later Lizette Woodworth Reese.52 For all the real interest of such anticipatory comparisons, this is to read proleptically, and in narrowly formalist terms, qualities in Jackson’s poetry as well as Dickinson’s that call for other kinds of historical explanation. To borrow Patricia Crain’s formulation once more, such readings miss their opportunities “to witness the small change of cul-

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tural capital at work.” The Galaxy’s 1875 barb connecting the special quality of Jackson’s poems with education and refinement usefully raises the historical question of just how education displays itself in her poetry as refinement, how it pays off in forms of distinction both markable and marketable in this historical moment. Clearly, Jackson’s way of writing a learned poetry, like Dickinson’s, is not that of Lucretia Maria Davidson or Lydia Sigourney in the earlier nineteenth century. Her poems draw on historical, classical, and literary references parsimoniously, suggesting an aristocratic economy of means—a decorum of reserving rather than displaying all one’s cultural capital.53 Nothing could be further from the detailed didactic geographies, historical and literary-historical, of much early nineteenth-century American women’s poetry than the blankly aestheticized abstract landscape of Jackson’s “No Man’s Land.”54 As we saw in chapter 2, Lydia Sigourney’s ideal village in “Connecticut River” is centered on the schoolhouse; by contrast, the landscape of Jackson’s “No Man’s Land” refuses “measure, wall, or bar or gate”—rejecting not only the marketplace but, implicitly, any formalized institution of acculturation. And indeed Jackson was overtly hostile to formal schooling in her popular prose, where she threw herself energetically behind the school reform movement, declaring in her essay “The Reign of Archelaus” (1867)—closely modeled after Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Atlantic essay “The Murder of the Innocents”—that “in regard to the number of hours of confinement, and amount of study required of children, it is hard to believe that schools have ever been much more murderously exacting than now.”55 Her contemporary readers, as we have seen, did not for a moment mistake the studied pastoral finish of Jackson’s poetry for unlettered verse; similarly, “The Reign of Archelaus” implies that to understand education, and especially mass public education, as “murderous” is the privilege of the already educated. Higginson’s monitory words on education, Jackson writes, “have with the light graceful beauty of the Damascus Blade its swift sureness in cleaving to the heart of things . . . which we wish could be put into every school house in the United States” (“Archelaus,” 51). Against the “murderous” institution of formal schooling, Jackson pits an aesthetic weapon that both displays (in the form of allusion) and conceals its social origins in education and inherited cultural capital. (One wonders how, exactly, this blade of Damascus would hang above American schoolrooms—what implicit threat Jackson would have had it represent to the aspirations of the students and teachers of the determined, ambitious, and dangerous classes toiling in them.) Perhaps recalling this very passage, Scribner’s a few years later would credit Jackson herself with possessing just such an aesthetic weapon in her poetry: “language is for her like tempered steel

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to the swordsman; it will bend double, flash the finest circles through the air, and observe discriminations of the thousandth part of an inch in leaping toward the point of attack.”56 She dealt her pretty words like blades, as Emily Dickinson could have said (and did, in 1862; see Fr 458). Jackson, like Dickinson, came by her cultural weaponry through informal modes of inheritance as much as or more than through formal education. As the daughter of an Amherst College professor of classical literature and theology, Jackson along with Dickinson answered to Higginson’s observation that “Among first-class American writers, culture is usually in the second generation; they have usually ‘tumbled about in a library,’ as Holmes says, in childhood” (“Plea,” 34), but she was also, like Dickinson, well schooled at Amherst Academy and other good secondary schools for young women.57 Unlike Holmes and Higginson, however, Jackson and Dickinson were of course not “college-bred men”—as Higginson goes on to characterize most “first-class American writers.” Born of secondgeneration and third-generation Amherst College families, Jackson and Dickinson by reason of gender were not able to attend the hometown college to which they were socially “bred”; Jackson had no college, and Dickinson’s nine months at Mount Holyoke Seminary would not have satisfied Harvard-educated Higginson’s sense of what it meant to be “college-bred.” (As a staunch advocate of women’s higher education, Higginson might well have felt this disability more energetically on their behalf than did either Jackson or Dickinson.) Situated historically between Sigourney’s and Davidson’s energetic arriviste displays of women’s primary and secondary schooling in the earlier nineteenth century and the large-scale entry of women into systematic, ambitious higher education toward the end of the nineteenth century, privileged as Frances Harper was not to take some achieved level of formal schooling for granted within their own race, gender, and class, both Jackson and Dickinson apparently felt their greatest entitlements in the sphere of culture through informal social modes of transmission rather than through formal institutions of schooling.58 As the Galaxy review of Jackson intuited, such informal modes of transmission tended to naturalize their possessor’s cultural capital as innate rather than acquired, the culture of “the educated . . . who are born so, rather than of those who obtain or ought to obtain both education and refinement against their wiles, like most of us.” For Dickinson, in her adult years, these modes of transmission came to be mediated by the privacies of epistolary exchange rather than embodied in direct personal relationships; for Jackson, the embodied face-to-face sociabilities of the postwar literary world were mediated by print and the marketplace. In their different ways, however, both poets laid claim to forms of cultural ambition

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largely autonomous of the school and its formal transmission of knowledges. Dickinson rendered one version of that ambition toward autonomy in this familiar poem, committed to the manuscript packet eventually to be known as Fascicle 24 sometime near the spring of 1863: The Spider holds a Silver Ball In unperceived Hands— And dancing softly to Himself His Yarn of Pearl—unwinds— He plies from nought to nought— In unsubstantial Trade— Supplants our Tapestries with His— In half the period— An Hour to rear supreme His Continents of Light— Then dangle from the Housewife’s Broom— His Boundaries—forgot— (Fr 513; div. Housewife’s /) As Barton Levi St. Armand, among many other Dickinson critics, has pointed out, “The spider holds a silver ball” in essence offers a miniature allegory of aesthetic autonomy.59 Dickinson’s spider anchors its tapestries to the wider social world by “nought”—which is to say, by relations of denial or refusal. As he assembles his beautiful island of pearl in “unsubstantial Trade” between nought and nought, the spider’s gratuitous production accrues no worldly interest—nought remains nought however multiplied. Like the cultural field itself in Pierre Bourdieu’s description, the web of Dickinson’s spider is implicitly constituted by “the denial of economic interest. . . . [In its own self-understanding,] the world of art [is] a sacred island systematically and ostentatiously opposed to the profane world of production, a sanctuary for gratuitous, distinterested activity in a universe given over to money and self-interest.”60 Not only does Dickinson’s poem refuse the economic world; it also rejects the sphere of culture dedicated to didactic or instrumental writing, the sphere identified strongly but by no means exclusively with women in the nineteenth century. Behind Dickinson’s spider, in St. Armand’s reading, lies a long history of religious, moralizing, and educational literary spiders, ranging from Edward Taylor’s and Jonathan Edwards’s Calvinist spiders to Emerson’s metaphor of the art-spider in his essay “Shakespeare” and Lydia Sigourney’s household-didact spider in

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her poem “The Insect Teacher.” Dickinson “tantalizes” her readers, Armand suggests, by playing off folk proverb and bourgeois moral apologue in “The spider holds a silver ball”—but at her poem’s “core is an exclusive, transcendent, antididactic theory of art for art’s sake.”61 Like Frances Harper’s nearly contemporary Reconstruction-era poetry, Dickinson’s poem condenses into small space several levels of cultural literacy—the sorts of literacies gained from formal schooling’s readers as well as from popular periodicals and from having “tumbled about in a library” during her relatively privileged childhood. But where Harper’s poetry mediates between levels of cultural hierarchy in the interests of widening African American access to culture, Dickinson plies her threads of multiple literacies into an artifact that disavows its external anchors and lives only for and in its own white light. In Erkkila’s, Mitchell’s, and Dobson’s more recent accounts of Dickinson’s work against that of her contemporaries, this poem’s investment in aesthetic autonomy is both politically suspect and what most sets Dickinson apart from other women writers of the nineteenth century. My comparison to Harper’s poetry here is meant to underline the partial truth and undeniable power of these readings, as far as they go. Moreover, as A´ıfe Murray and Domhnall Mitchell most recently have argued, Dickinson’s ability to devote time to autonomous poetry relied on the daily labors of the homestead’s household staff of Irish immigrant workers.62 Like the broom-wielding Irish “Bridget” of another of Dickinson’s spider poems,63 Margaret O’Brien and Margaret Maher swept up after the Dickinson family, lighted their lamps, warmed their rooms, and cooked their meals. In Dickinson’s poem, the housewife and her ravaging broom are the agents of the web’s destruction; in actual historical fact, however, this housewife, or her historical equivalents, was the condition of the textual web’s possibility. It is this fundamental class relationship of material dependence on others that Dickinson sees through the looking glass—by negation, as the economic world reversed—in “The spider holds a silver ball.”64 These politically hostile readings, however, may overstate the poem’s investment in an absolutist version of aesthetic autonomy and may also overstate or misunderstand its distance from the work of many of Dickinson’s contemporaries among American women poets. “The spider holds a silver ball” is as much about relativizing as about securing the spider’s aesthetic autonomy; that is the job of the housewife’s broom, and the poem assures its readers, without commentary or lament, that the broom does its work. The spider dangling from the housewife’s broom both recognizes and misrecognizes Dickinson’s actual dependence on the labor of these intimate others; to “depend,” etymologically, is to hang from. Furthermore, the surviving manuscript of the

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poem couples this implied etymological pun with a visual pun: the word “Broom,” metrically and phonologically part of the line “Then dangle from the Housewife’s Broom—” (and therefore printed with that line in Franklin’s edition), actually runs over onto a separate line in Dickinson’s manuscript—the only line in the poem so divided. The broom dangles from its associated line as the spider dangles from the housewife’s broom; as the spider depends from the broom, in the vehicle of the poem’s metaphor, the poet depends on the broom in the indirectly acknowledged world of the poem’s writing. The poem thus qualifies the autonomy of its spider’s idealist aesthetic “Continents of Light” at the level of both vehicle and tenor, foregrounding both web and poem’s determination by, and dependence on, the material substrates of writing.65 In its concern with transcending a didactic tradition, Jackson’s selfpositioning in the field of culture in her poem about spiders and their webs, “Crossed Threads,” is not so dissimilar from Dickinson’s: The silken threads by viewless spinners spun, Which float so idly on the summer air, And help to make each summer morning fair Shining like silver in the summer sun, Are caught by wayward breezes, one by one, And blown to east and west and fastened there, Weaving on all the roads their sudden snare. No sign which road doth safest, freest run, The wing`ed insects know, that soar so gay To meet their death upon each summer day. How dare we any human deed arraign; Attempt to reckon any moment’s cost; Or any pathway trust as safe and plain Because we see not where the threads have crossed? (Poems, 195) Some comparisons with Dickinson’s “The spider holds a silver ball” suggest themselves immediately. “Crossed Threads” obeys the formal laws of the high-art sonnet rather than Dickinson’s popular hymn or ballad stanza. Jackson’s “viewless spinners” echo Dickinson’s “unperceived” spider, but Jackson’s diction is more poetic, calling up the world of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” where the poet’s revery joins the nightingale “on the viewless wings of poesy.” Like Dickinson’s poem, Jackson’s turns to the human world at the end; unlike Dickinson’s poem, Jackson’s issues in an explicit moral evaluation and an implicit moral imperative—judge not lest ye be judged. Finally, Jackson’s concluding moral quatrain metaphorically equates the webs of her spiders

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with the “crossed threads” of the human social world rather than with the autonomous art-world of Dickinson’s spider.66 Noting Jackson’s “compulsion” to draw such morals, Joanne Dobson argues that Jackson’s poetry, unlike Dickinson’s, “is characterized by a didacticism uncongenial to the modern reader” (85) but thoroughly grounded in earlier nineteenth-century women’s poetics, like that of Lydia Sigourney. It seems to me rather that Jackson’s didacticism in this poem is didacticism at the vanishing point, by comparison with either earlier American women’s poetry or Jackson’s own later social art. The moral of “Crossed Threads” is as evacuated as the landscape of Jackson’s “No Man’s Land” is unrealized and abstracted. The poem’s final quatrain enjoins us not to judge human actions: this moral, insofar as it is one, is entirely in keeping with later nineteenth-century American high culture’s defining alienation from the moral strictures of orthodox Calvinism (and contrasts with Josiah Holland’s nostalgic efforts in Kathrina to fold these strictures back into ambitious poetry). This moral is not in keeping, however, with what will eventually become Jackson’s mission in her social art—to “arraign” the government of the United States for its deeds of exploitation and extermination in regard to Native Americans. The “moral” of “Crossed Threads” is rather a naturalized aesthetic pathos of indetermination: because we are each of us blown here and there by the winds, because our threads tangle by accident, there is no way of reading the human social world in terms of moral cause and effect. What the poem finally teaches is that the social world is not legible, only beautiful. Jackson’s readers, if not the wing`ed insects, can read the signs of death in this world; but what cannot be read is any sign of intention or struggle. By contrast with “Crossed Threads,” Dickinson’s “The spider holds a silver ball” represents an aesthetic world of labor, embodiment, and intention rather than weightlessness, idleness, and pure contingency. Where Jackson’s wing`ed insects “soar” in idleness on the wind, Dickinson’s spider “rears supreme / His continents of light”; deferring “light” to the end of this phrase, across the enjambment, preserves the sense of overcoming gravity by effort in “rearing.” Gravity overtakes Dickinson’s spider in the end, dangling from the housewife’s broom, but it can only do so because the spider has been so vividly embodied from the beginning of the poem, as he controls the minute ascents and descents of his dance. His subjection to gravity makes the spider vulnerable, but as embodiment it is also the condition of his labor, which is to say, in Dickinson’s poem, his pleasure; by contrast, no embodied subject owns the weightless beauty and agentless pathos of Jackson’s “Crossed Threads.” A very similar opposition between Dickinson’s and Jackson’s aes-

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thetics governs another striking pair of poems, Dickinson’s “Dare you see a soul at the ‘White Heat’ ” and Jackson’s “The Poet’s Forge.” In the case of these two poems, unlike the “spider” poems, the similarity may reflect a direct conversation between the two poets’ work. Dickinson wrote “Dare you see a soul at the ‘White Heat’ ” around 1862 and sent a copy to Thomas Wentworth Higginson; that manuscript is lost, but Higginson later mentioned the poem when, after Dickinson’s death, he compiled a list of the poems he had received from her, and in 1891 he published a lightly edited version, under the title “The White Heat,” in the Atlantic Monthly. Since it was through Higginson that Jackson first came to read Dickinson’s manuscript poems (Higginson apparently shared with Jackson a sheaf of the poems that Dickinson had sent him in letters over the years), it is entirely possible that Jackson may have read “Dare you see a soul at the ‘White Heat’ ” in the copy that Dickinson sent to Higginson.67 Whether or not she did, the similarity of these poems certainly reflects their participation in a shared cultural field— more precisely, their shared aspirations to membership in the high field of American literary culture: Longfellow’s famous “The Village Blacksmith” (first published in his Voices of the Night [1839]) is likely the most direct inspiration for both of them. Longfellow’s familiar blacksmith clearly belongs to the antebellum cultural field of didactic poetry, a genre not confined by any means to women poets. His brow “wet with honest sweat” teaches a very American moral lesson about the nobility of honest labor, one that the poet turns around on himself at the end of the poem: addressing this manual laborer as his “worthy friend” and social equal, Longfellow admonishes himself to live his life with an effort equal to the blacksmith’s. The poet’s intellectual and moral labor, otherwise invisible and perhaps even unmanly, metaphorically borrows moral heft and density from the “brawny” body of the blacksmith, while the poet’s song both borrows and lightens with the ballad’s interspersed anapests the “measured beat and slow” of the smith’s more consistently iambic “heavy sledge.” On the other side of the exchange, the poet lends the blacksmith his own cultural capital of sentiment and song in the shape of the village choir that recalls to him his dead wife’s voice (anticipating the transactions between Paul and his wife at the end of Kathrina), “Singing in Paradise.”68 Where Longfellow’s village blacksmith opens his generously didactic forge to the “children coming home from school” who “love to see the flaming forge, / And hear the bellows roar,” Dickinson’s version of the poet’s forge presents itself as much more dangerous of approach: Dare you see a Soul at the “White Heat”? Then crouch within the door—

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Red—is the Fire’s common tint— But when the quickened* Ore Has *sated Flame’s conditions— *She quivers from the Forge Without a color, but the Light Of unannointed Blaze—

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*vivid *vanquished *it

Least Village, boasts it’s Blacksmith Whose Anvil’s even ring Stands symbol for the finer Forge That soundless tugs—within— Refining these impatient Ores With Hammer, and with Blaze Until the designated Light Repudiate the Forge— (Fr 401C) Helen Hunt Jackson, by contrast with Dickinson, does not add bodily danger to the blacksmith’s forge in transforming Longfellow; instead, she subtracts not just danger but bodily labor altogether from the poetsmith’s vocation: He lies on his back, the idling smith, A lazy, dreaming fellow is he; The sky is blue, or the sky is gray, He lies on his back the livelong day; Not a tool in sight; say what they may, A curious sort of a smith is he. . . . High over his head his metals swing; He hammers them idly year by year, Hammers and chuckles a low refrain: “A bench and book are a ball and chain, The adze is better tool than the plane; What’s the odds between now and next year!” Hammers and chuckles his low refrain, A lazy, dreaming fellow is he: When sudden, some day, his bells peal out, And men, at the sound, for gladness shout; He laughs and asks what it’s all about; Oh, a curious sort of a smith is he! (Poems, 212) In their different ways, both Dickinson’s and Jackson’s poems signal their allegiance to Longfellow as cultural capital by leaving behind his

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moral didacticism. Jackson’s poem celebrates the absence of bodily labor in the poet’s vocation; her poet is a “curious sort of smith,” idle and “lazy,” because he does not seem to work; he only dreams. His materials, unlike those of Longfellow’s blacksmith, are aristocratic—“Fine gold and silver”—but Jackson insists that this is the magical aristocracy of culture rather than of earthly powers; this is “gold and silver to shame the king.” And the magical aristocracy of culture, in Jackson’s dream, enjoys a perfect relationship with an appreciative, because uncomprehending, audience: the poet’s bells peal out, and men “for gladness shout”; though the “wondering folk” scarcely understand him, the poet perfectly anticipates and masters the preorchestrated social harmony of their response.69 Dickinson’s way of transforming Longfellow’s didacticism, on the other hand, follows Longfellow in emphasizing poetic creation as embodied labor—a labor on and of the poet’s self. By contrast with Jackson’s version of “The Poet’s Forge,” Dickinson’s is a poem about aesthetic autonomy in which autonomy exacts the full measure of its bodily and social price.70 Where Longfellow’s blacksmith labors within a communal context, however, and worships at the shrines of communal feeling, Dickinson’s “Soul,” which starts as “Ore” and becomes “Light,” comes to “repudiate” its social contexts and determinations. The relationship between the poet and her audience is imagined here as strained, even adversarial: Dare you see a soul at the white heat; if you want to see it, you must come close (as with the spider) and crouch within reach of danger. Mitchell, Dobson, and Erkkila would be right, I think, to read this poem as repudiating the socially minded didacticism of earlier nineteenth-century poetics in favor of high aesthetic autonomy. Mitchell, who reads this poem in detail, sees it as “partly an act of self-promotion and partly a challenge (both to blacksmiths and to readers): she imagines herself as the fashioner of something much more necessary and lasting than objects of utility and trade. . . . There are additional class aspects: the careful distinction between ‘common’ and ‘finer,’ as well as the double act of renunciation (‘Light’ from the ‘Forge’ of the poem, and the scene of the poem from real forges and blacksmiths) and the fairly typical hierarchies of mental and manual labor” (288). Mitchell’s corrective response to “Dare you see a soul at the ‘White Heat’ ” is to supply what Dickinson’s poem—and even more, it is important to observe, Helen Hunt Jackson’s—renounces, the historical realities of the labor of blacksmiths in Dickinson’s Amherst; his reading of Dickinson cites neither Longfellow nor any other literary source. But the historical sources of both Dickinson’s and Jackson’s poems may lie at least as immediately in the literary culture to which they responded

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and of which they are a part; and surely the social effects of these poems for their readers—Jackson’s in her own day, Dickinson’s for the most part after her death—have always resided not in what they have directly told readers about the blacksmith’s work, nor even in their failure to convey more about the material realities of that work, but rather in the ambition both poems tacitly entertain to participate in changing the rules of the nineteenth-century American literary field. The relative autonomy of culture is a real historical fact with historical and political consequences; refusing this fact (refusing to read Dickinson or Jackson in the context of Longfellow’s poetry, as well as each other’s) will not help in either understanding it or changing it. Returning to Pierre Bourdieu’s mapping of the field of culture, I suggest we see Emily Dickinson’s poetic web as spun out between the poles of bourgeois art and social art that Helen Hunt Jackson’s career, along with that of many other American women poets, helped stake out toward the end of the nineteenth century. Suspended between these two poles in the cultural field as well as within the larger social field’s transformations, Dickinson’s autonomous art, as her spider seems to know, is anything but stable. Her autonomy is relative, her web of refusals always subject to being crossed by larger and smaller forces. What Dickinson also insists on, however, is the embodied effort and pleasure her spider takes in the labor of plying his relatively autonomous space. The now-familiar literary-historical paradox of that embodied aesthetic space is of course that Dickinson’s authorship did not realize social embodiment or agency in the cultural field in her own lifetime. This paradox gains in historical meaning by contrast with how thoroughly Helen Hunt Jackson achieved social embodiment as a professional author, an achievement correlated, in her poetry, with an aesthetics of disembodiment and a disavowal of agency.

CHAPTER SIX

Metropolitan Pastoral: The Salon Poetry of Annie Fields

In her own day as in ours, Annie Adams Fields could hardly have been more identified with the salon as a site of literary production and performance. The Beacon Hill address first occupied by Annie Fields and her husband, the publisher and editor James Fields—148 Charles Street—became during Annie Fields’s own lifetime, and has to some extent remained, a fond metonym for an entire stratum of late nineteenth-century elite American belles lettres organized around the Atlantic Monthly (edited by James Fields from 1861 to 1871) and the publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields (in all its various nineteenth-century ownership incarnations).1 Rather more recently, 148 Charles Street has become iconic for interpretations of late nineteenth-century women’s cultures of letters as the site of the salon presided over by Annie Fields with her companion after the death of James Fields, Sarah Orne Jewett. In addition to Fields and Jewett, the salon on Charles Street figured in the lives and careers of a number of other women writers and artists, including Celia Thaxter, Imogen Guiney, Willa Cather, and Sarah Whitman, as well as women of a slightly older generation, like Lucy Larcom and Louisa May Alcott. Noted men of Anglo-American letters like Henry James, Charles Dickens, and Matthew Arnold were no less frequent visitors.2 Annie Fields herself, I will argue in this chapter, was strikingly selfconscious about the extent to which she defined the salon as a site of poetic production in distinction to other sites of nineteenth-century American women’s writing. As Richard Brodhead has observed, the convergence of Henry James and Matthew Arnold with the women writers and artists of Annie Fields’s salon is only one of the markers distinguishing that salon, as a space of literary production, from earlier nineteenth-century locations of middle-class women’s domestic culture. More often celebrated today for the bonds it sponsored among women, bonds seen as reflected in the woman-centered communities depicted in Sarah Orne Jewett’s regionalist fiction, Annie Fields’s salon in Brodhead’s view actually constituted a social sphere not so much separated by gender as defined by its allegiance to an emergent late nineteenthcentury aesthetic sphere of high culture. The women who came together

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in the social sphere of Annie Fields’s salon did so on the basis of their common religion of art, exercised within a self-consciously distinct social stratum, rather than on the basis of potentially cross-class literary alliances among women imagined as sharing a gendered separate sphere.3 Controversial as Brodhead’s line of argument has been,4 to my mind there is little in either the literary production of Fields’s salon, taken as a whole, or its social practices to dispute it. Even Annie Fields’s charitable work among poor Boston women and men in the 1870s, work in which Fields was notably successful and about which she published widely, was modeled not so much on the cross-class bonds of womanhood, bonds in which earlier nineteenth-century forms of domestic sentimental literature might have been enlisted, as on the newer schools of rationalized philanthropy.5 In Fields’s writing about her philanthropic work, social segregation by gender figures as an occasional and regrettable means of disciplining the unruly poor, rather than as the common lot of all virtuous women or the special privilege of women of independent financial means. Writing for Harper’s in “The Employment, Education, and Protection of Women” (1878), for instance, Fields made it clear that her scope encompassed the education of both upper-class and working-class women, but her ideas of curricular reform for women of the two classes were hardly identical. Elite women’s intellectual and social educations were not nearly rigorous enough, in her view. “The words ‘accurate scholarship’ are almost a mockery to-day,” Fields sniffed, “used in connection with the education of girls in our private day schools of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. A girl of sixteen is no exception who is stumbling through ‘sum’ and ‘habeo,’ and who can not give one rule in English grammar.” Fields went on to praise the education offered by Vassar and Wellesley colleges—both of them pioneers, but especially Vassar, in extending high classical literary educations to women—for its “wonderful contrast to the fashionable dabbling with second-rate teachers at expensive day schools in our cities.”6 Basic literacy and vocational training, however, were necessarily to be the predominant stuff of working-class women’s educations: “general education for working-girls, which shall fit them to be good housekeepers for working-men, or useful servants.”7 Bettering both rich and poor women’s education, Fields argued, depended on developing the sphere of philanthropic social action, but that sphere was not to be constituted on the basis of direct cross-class identifications among women or a common women’s domestic literary culture so much as on upper-class men and women’s common allegiance to a civic ideal of metropolitan pastoralism, a husbandry that extended from the hygiene and work habits of the poor through the cultural resources

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of the elite—resources clearly underdeveloped, Fields thought, in the case of rich women. She wrote about her charity work, she said, “in order to indicate ways and means by which the unfortunate may be assisted without waste of the precious material which is needed every where for the higher culture of humanity.”8 Philanthropic work, in Fields’s view, called upon the gendered social virtues—and, implicitly, the shared class identifications—of both men and women of the upper class, “man and woman work[ing] together in mutual trust, love, and reverence.” She explicitly warned against charitable institutions run on the “principle of separate government,” reciting cautionary tales about the equal and opposite horrors of charitable institutions either run by a “Lady Superior of a Sisterhood, without any man,” or “under the government of a set of men, armed with a grim authority,” with “no woman near them, . . . no gentle voice or light tread.”9 And Fields carried out her principles in her philanthropic practice, drafting William Dean Howells and Phillips Brooks as well as her women friends to serve as visitors among Boston’s poor.10 Fields distinguished herself from the domestic-sentimental women’s culture of an earlier generation in her belletristic writings as well as in her philanthropy and in the social practices of her salon. Indeed, Fields’s extensive series of biographical sketches of fellow authors—compiled over many years, ranging over England and the United States and from her elders like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to contemporaries like her friend Celia Thaxter—consistently occupied itself with the theme of generational differentiation among writers, especially American women writers.11 For all her famous social warmth and for all the unruffled gentility of her literary persona, Fields at times quite aggressively aged her friends and precursors among women writers—aged them in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of positioning them as outmoded within a cultural field driven by a dynamic of social aging and supersession.12 In one well-known instance of this habit, Fields summed up her differences with Harriet Beecher Stowe, a dear friend and important author for Ticknor and Fields, by excluding her from both the timeless realm of literature and the living artistic present: “Books as a medium of the ideas of the age, and as the promulgators of morals and religion were of course like the breath of her life; but a study of the literature of the past as the only true foundation for a literature of the present was outside the pale of her occupations, and for the larger portion of her life outside of her interest.”13 The presentness of true literature, in Fields’s mind, is guaranteed paradoxically by its dependence on past literature rather than the moral controversies of the present—which is to say, by true literature’s relative autonomy as a field of high culture. By implicit contrast with the out-

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dated presentness of her literary foremother Stowe, Fields secures the timeless presentness of her own self-image of consecrated modernity. Bourdieu’s famous description of contests within the nineteenth-century French field applies to Fields’s strategies, but only with a certain correction for the effects of gender. In Bourdieu’s words, the self-styled “young” producers “have an interest in describing every advance in the internal hierarchy of the sub-field of restricted production as an advance in the hierarchy of the field of cultural production as a whole, and therefore contest the independence of the internal hierarchy”—the established “mandarins” of culture (Field of Cultural Production, 59). Annie Fields indeed figures her differences with Harriet Beecher Stowe as a matter of progress in “the field of cultural production as a whole,” but rather than contesting an established mandarinate, Fields in effect both argues for and performatively demonstrates, through her characterization of Stowe, women’s entry into a mandarinate safeguarding the autonomy of the restricted field of cultural production. Fields defined her own mandarin modernity not just in contrast with individual literary foremothers but in opposition to entire institutional milieus of earlier nineteenth-century women’s poetry. As we have already seen, perhaps the central early nineteenth-century site for the production and consumption of poetry by women was the school, especially the primary or common school to which women had the greatest access as both students and teachers. For exemplary earlier nineteenthcentury American women poets like Lucretia Davidson and Lydia Sigourney, the school’s performance space of recitation and the roles it made available—precocious (and always-already dead) child prodigy in Davidson’s case, schoolmistress in Sigourney’s—fundamentally constituted their public identities as poets. Consider the contrast, then, between these earlier nineteenth-century school-based poets and Annie Fields’s emblematic late nineteenth-century remembrance of her own experience in primary schooling, in a literacy narrative that Fields in 1893 used to open a belletristic essay paying tribute to her acquaintance Alfred, Lord Tennyson: There is a keen remembrance, lingering ineradicably with the writer, of a little girl coming to school once upon recitation day, with a “piece” of her own selection safely stored away in her childish memory. It was a new poem to the school, and when her turn came to recite her soul was full of the gleam and glory of Camelot. She felt as if she were unlocking a treasure-house, and it was with unspeakable pleasure to herself that she gave, verse after verse, the entire poem of “The Lady of Shalott.” Doubtless the child’s voice drifted away into sing-song, as her whole little self seemed to drift away into the land

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of faery, and doubtless also the busy teacher, who was more familiar with Jane Taylor and Cowper, was sadly puzzled. When the child at length sat down, scarcely knowing where she was in her sudden descent from the land of marvel, she heard the teacher say, to her amazement and discouragement, after an ominous pause, “I wonder if any young lady can tell me what this poem means?” There was no reply. “Can you tell us?” was the next question, pointed at the poor little girl who had just dropped out of cloudland. “I thought it explained itself,” was the plaintive reply. With a slight air of depreciation, in another moment the next recitation was called for, and the dull clouds of routine shut down over the sudden glory. “Shades of the prison-house” then and there began to close over the growing child.14 Fields’s anecdotal “remembrance,” allusively couched in the vocabulary of Wordsworthian romantic memory, suggests volumes about her ambivalent relationship to the teacher-mothers of earlier nineteenth-century women’s didactic-domestic writing. The teacher in this anecdote speaks in the voice of an outmoded educational regime, the eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century tradition of recitation pieces culled from literary works in bits and scraps amenable to moralistic redaction (“what does it mean?”). The teacher’s precocious, misunderstood pupil, on the other hand—but precocious in a different mode from that of Lucretia Davidson near the opening of the nineteenth century—brings to the classroom a cultural capital obviously acquired elsewhere, one signaled by its respect for the aesthetic integrity of a literary work in its entirety and its refusal to subordinate the literary work to didactic paraphrase.15 The performance space of the classroom, as imagined here, thus conjures up another space behind it, a space shielded from direct observation but necessarily implied by the story. Where, we must ask, did “the little girl coming to school” learn her Tennyson?—which is to ask, not just how and where the text of the poem was available to her but how she acquired the aesthetic disposition (in Pierre Bourdieu’s term) according to which she read it, a disposition at once naturalized in the anecdote (as a child’s native wonder at the beauties of Tennyson) and given a very definite literary genealogy (in the adult narrator’s quotation from Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode). The primary school as Fields remembers it lags behind the culture of letters promulgated in the privileged private home—which for Fields is not a culture of domestic letters in the earlier nineteenth-century sense, despite its location. Its stress on the integral, intransitive literary work links Fields’s anecdote of schooling to a more general modernizing movement in Ameri-

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can letters in the 1880s and 1890s, one well illustrated in Horace Scudder’s Atlantic article of 1887, “American Classics in School,” which called for establishing a literary curriculum for the common schools based on “the continuous reading of a classic” rather than “scraps from a variety of sources, good, bad, and indifferent,” but always “duly paragraphed and numbered.” Like Scudder’s, Fields’s ideal of a modern literary curriculum is one irreducible to thematic moral paraphrase; in Bourdieu’s terms, it embodies doxa rather than discursive orthodoxy.16 Fields’s literacy narrative, or more precisely, her narrative of competing literacies, establishes that whatever Fields imagined her salon to be, it was not the performance space of the antebellum primary school that had sponsored so much earlier nineteenth-century women’s poetry.17 Fields represents herself in “Tennyson” as wholly inhabited by “The Lady of Shallot,” a perfectly transparent medium not only for the transmission of Tennyson’s poem in its imaginative (rather than didactive or moral) integrity but for the ideally autonomous poetic tradition, stretching from Tennyson backward to Wordsworth and beyond, of which she makes herself the vessel. Developed in tandem with the later nineteenth-century introduction of “American classics” into the schoolroom, Fields’s strategy of aesthetic modernity was persistently to reclassicize the American English vernacular.18 When Fields—as did Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson—rewrites her friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s schoolroom classic, “The Village Blacksmith,” as “At the Forge,” she makes the god barely concealed behind Longfellow’s vernacular smith come forth and speak in his Greek name: “I am Hephaistos, and forever here / Stand at the forge and labor.” Longfellow’s vernacular myth of instruction seeks to minimize the class distance between the smith and the poet in diction as well as thematic content; Fields’s version, by contrast, reopens exactly that gulf in its insistence on the classical god as the mediating figure without whom the poet would neither feel the contrast between the endurance of labor and the Keatsian transience of nature (“Labor endures, but all of these must pass!”) nor be motivated to represent the laboring classes to themselves—to “learn and tell / Those who must labor by the dusty way!”19 Fields’s epigraph for Under the Olive, her collection of 1881 in which “At the Forge” appears, summons “The Dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule / Our spirits from their urns.” It might fairly be said of almost all of Fields’s poetry that she had no subject save for that announced in this epigraph, no subject save for the transmission of Culture, indeed no desire save for Culture itself. To the extent that Fields’s poetry has been read at all in the twentieth century, it has been read in the search for another subject, usually seen as repressed under the weight of those

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very patriarchal urns: the story of women’s desire and, especially, women’s affectional and erotic attachments to one another. Thus framed, the search has disappointed a number of readers who have looked in Fields’s poetry for the warm erotic core of her long relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett; Josephine Donovan’s entry on Anne Fields, in American Women Writers, for example, laments the impersonality of her writings, and Donovan finds much more provocation in Jewett’s unpublished love poetry (as well as in those of Jewett’s letters that Annie Fields kept from publication after Jewett’s death).20 I would propose, however, that the marmoreal scandal of Fields’s poetry for American feminist literary history lies in its sometimes strained efforts to make these apparently separate subjects—the transmission of culture, and women’s desire, especially but not only desire between women—become one and the same. In Fields’s writing, women’s desire does not so much lie on a continuum with the domestic-pedagogical women’s culture of the earlier nineteenth century, or with the nonmetropolitan women’s cultures represented in Sarah Orne Jewett’s regionalist fiction,21 as it embodies the Arnoldian cultural virtue of disinterestedness. The performance space of the salon, as Annie Fields so famously and successfully elaborated it, ultimately found its literary print equivalent in Fields’s poetic scripting of female desire as desire for the disinterested transmission of culture. I have already sketched some of the ways in which Fields differentiated the salon, as a site of women’s poetic production, from the performance space of the primary schoolroom and its culture of recitation. This chapter goes on to read Fields’s attempt, early in her career, to define and enter a civic performance space for her poetry and ends with some of Fields’s later poems that probe the connections between female desire, the transmission of culture, and the performance space of the salon, including two of her classical verse plays, The Return of Persephone (printed in 1877) and Orpheus: A Masque (published in 1900), which offer especially rich internal meditations on the poetics and politics of Fields’s salon. On November 2, 1863, a Monday evening, Boston’s cultural elite packed the Boston Music Hall for the much-anticipated inauguration ceremony of the new “great organ,” as it was already widely referred to in the Boston press. In addition to the musical part of the program, the noted Shakespearean actress Charlotte Cushman was to preface the concert by reciting an ode specially written for the inauguration. The organizers of the ceremony had invited Cushman to recite some months before the dedication; seeking a poet to write a commemorative ode, they had commissioned Cushman’s friend, Annie Fields, to write a poem for the occasion.22 Although Annie and James T. Fields as a couple stood at the

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acknowledged center of Boston’s literary elite, thanks to James Fields’s editorship of the Atlantic Monthly and partnership in Ticknor and Fields, Annie Fields herself was, as of November 1863, an aspiring but relatively little-published poet. (Some seven of her lyrics had appeared by then, anonymously or under a pseudonym, in the pages of the Atlantic.) The organ “Ode,” then, constituted Annie Fields’s debut as a poet of significant public ambition. The ode’s authorship, although not publicly acknowledged in the ceremony, was an open secret among Boston’s literati, and the poem was printed and distributed in program copies, in the Boston newspapers, and in an independent private printing.23 Under these distinctly mixed performance circumstances—of quasi-anonymous authorship, with her spoken words deferred to the female body of a professional actress—Fields would stake her claim to the status of civic poet laureate in her “Ode.” She and James Fields celebrated the occasion on November 2 with a small dinner before the inauguration ceremony and concert. They invited Nathaniel Hawthorne, a family friend and, of course, one of Ticknor and Fields’s most important authors, to come along with them; he declined, but his daughter Una attended both the dinner and the ceremony with the Fieldses. A wider roster of guests, including Dr. and Mrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Julia Ward Howe, returned to the Fieldses’ house for a reception following the concert.24 What the concertgoers heard Charlotte Cushman recite was a long civic poem (almost two hundred lines) clearly modeled upon Wordsworth’s and Emerson’s experiments in the irregular ode. Thematically, Annie Fields used the occasion of the “Ode” to rewrite the history of Boston, from 1630 forward, as a story of aesthetic redemption. Her opening tribute to the Puritan founders of the city is decidedly tempered. “Our fathers,” the “Ode” declares, clutched the wild shore stark and cold Saying, This strand shall be our home, And let no despot hither come; Strong of purpose, strong of bone, We will govern it alone. (2) In their very rigor of determination to exclude external despots, however, the Puritans bound themselves round with what the “Ode” calls “cold despotic bands.” Fields’s diagnosis of the Puritans’ sins is not original, of course—but the “Ode” quite pointedly does not ask its audience to receive it as original: . . . Mercy’s height our fathers could not gain, Nor perfect justice did their hearts contain;

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They sinned their sins; the tale is not untold. And bitterness of arrogance And wily hate and ignorance Heaped their poisoned agony Upon the young-browed colony . . . (2) As Fields seems to have hoped her audience would realize—especially those members of the audience whom she invited to the occasion—her poem’s version of history is one mediated by Hawthorne’s fictional tale of seventeenth-century Boston. Fields’s small aside about the tale “not untold” reminds her audience of the literary bonds uniting them, indeed, underlines for a moment how the entire performance occasion of the “Ode” aims at scripting civic bonds as artistic bonds. On a more intimate level of address, we may imagine Cushman, the actress onstage reciting Fields’s lines, who is also a frequenter of Fields’s salon and a friend of Hawthorne’s, bowing (as it were) toward Fields and her party in the audience; in the political Imaginary of the “Ode,” mid-nineteenthcentury civic space and the space of the salon thus mirror, complement, and constitute one another. This was not, as Annie Fields concedes, the political Imaginary of Boston’s founders. Liberation comes to Puritan Boston when the city on the hill but not the heights, in Fields’s view, revises its model of citizenship to stress artistic over religious election, or more precisely the first as the truest version of the second. And performing women, the “Ode” implies, are in some way essential to Boston’s redemption of its civic space from its “despotic” Puritan founders, even when they do not figure visibly in the poem’s narrative. Fields’s “Ode” measures the distance between Puritan Boston and her own enlightened city not only by overt statement but also performatively, in its implied contrast between the famous actress reciting Fields’s lines on the Boston Music Hall stage and the disgraced Hester Prynne on the scaffold. The actress onstage voicing Boston’s civic pride (with the Puritan fathers, we may imagine, turning in their graves) embodies what the “Ode” frames thematically as a necessary break with the city’s origins—necessary for the purposes of the organ inauguration, ultimately (the “Ode” will say) necessary for winning the Civil War. In a kind of second founding, echoing its first thanksgiving feast, the city fathers move to redeem their “despotic” past by electing musicians from among Boston’s citizens, holding a contest for the instrument’s design, and finally building a great organ in the image of a redeemed polity. At last, in thankfulness, they said, We will choose from out our own

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Those who early loved and reverent laid Their listening ear to the harmonic shell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We have sinned, and need a psalm for sadness; We have joyed, and should find voice for gladness; We will build an organ vast. It shall sound a noble blast And wear a stately form . . . (3) The organ projected by the city fathers will speak in the voice of romantic nature rather than Puritan theology, thus erasing the cruelties of Boston’s original foundation and rechartering its nineteenth-century citizens as the people of nature’s innocent nation: It shall tell of mountain streams, Until we hear their quickly flowing dreams, Ringing to music for our waking hours; It shall rehearse the tale of pine-strewed woods, Until their pensive moods Shall haunt the common street with their weird powers; They who dwell in inland homes May learn the murmur of the sea, Through its tumultuous tone, Surging, as when the northwind comes, After a storm, while yet the fierce waves moan, And drives the herded clouds across the crystal lea. Nature in every form that soothes our pain Shall come to us again, As when in childhood’s hours of rest We lay upon her breast; The organ then shall lead the quiring soul Onward to worlds where unheard anthems roll. (3–4) Fields imagines Boston’s great organ as the voice of a kind of civic Wordsworthianism, bringing the city’s surrounding mighty waters to inland dwellers in the safety of the Music Hall and ensuring that the citizens who tread Boston’s common streets in the light of her common day will still hear the music of the woods leveled in the city’s expansion. For the purposes of her “Ode,” American nature simply is Wordsworth, far more than any concrete American natural setting. Fields’s conspicuous borrowings here from the “Intimations” ode imply that Boston’s separation from its Puritan origins allows the nineteenth-century city to frame a less

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militantly defended version of American cultural nationalism than that of its founders: rather than facing off against Britain, armed to resist encroaching despots, Fields’s “Ode” discreetly honors the concord of Anglo-American letters. The elaborate decorative housing of the new organ itself, in Fields’s lengthy ekphrastic tribute, embodies Boston’s history rewritten as an epitome of ideal aesthetic world history. Starting from a foundation of nature, columns of wood “crowned with the forest’s leafy hair,” the housing rises to carved Titans, “two stray sons of Atlas,” who in their turn support classical caryatids, and culminates in the image of “divine Cecilia,” the Christian patron saint of music; above and beyond her image rise Emersonian faceless circles of melody, “circle into circle breaking, / Wider circles still awaking” (7). The only obstacle to Boston’s hegemony as the culmination of world culture is the Civil War, heard distantly in the “Ode” as “A heavy noise that quelled each rising thought” (8). The first duty of the great organ, Fields grants, must be elegy: “Let its first notes tell the eloquent story / Of fresh desires like autumn lustre shed, / The willing tribute of our faith and glory” (9). But the nation, she insists, needs more from its civic art, and soon, than “A voice for weeping, / And a bell for tolling” (8): Now the offering stands completed, Be its joyful advent greeted! . . . And if the notes must tell of Beauty fled From this earth-bound portal To the gate immortal, Thence, on radiant wing, their resonant might shall bring Fairer Beauty born of Duty, Beauty fled, but never dead, The mortal and immortal wed. (9) And so Fields concludes her “Ode” by calling for a musician worthy of Boston’s civic organ—a musician nominally male, and yet imaginable as a woman: Let the musician come, Fresh from that star where Genius has its home, Whose sympathetic soul Sways, like the wind-swept grain, To human joy or pain, And yet no passions trample to their base control. His hand shall vibrate the responsive strings, Rising on supernal wings

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Of Music’s wondrous mystery: Now at his touch, unveiled are hidden things, Now falls oppression, and decay false kings; Through all the tones the cry of freedom rings One choral chant, one song of praise,—a nation’s victory! (11) The civic poet summoned in the conclusion to Fields’s “Ode” will win the Civil War by purely aesthetic means: by staying at home, vibrating with responsive sympathy, and felling slavery with song—by means of the transmission of culture, in short. And unlike military sacrifices, of course, these means of waging war were fully available to women of Annie Fields’s education and class.25 Reading Fields’s “Ode” more than a century later, it may be all but impossible to imagine the poem as the occasion of fighting words, but so it became—and it is worth trying to understand why, if we want to understand women writers’ stakes in trying to enter the field of civic culture in midcentury Boston as a field of very real struggle. Writing for the Boston daily Commonwealth, in an unsigned review titled “How to Regard the Great Organ,” Julia Ward Howe (unrestrained by any sense of social obligation as one of the Fieldses’ guests following the inauguration ceremony) roundly castigated the conventional complacency and “false ambition” of Annie Fields’s “Ode.”26 “Surely,” Howe wrote, “among the literary men and women of Boston, among those who really could, might have been found some one who should have spoken the word for the hour which, whether in prose or verse, was what the public wanted to hear.” As the recent author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862) and of a book entitled Words for the Hour (1857), Howe may well have had reason to feel that her own claims to the status of public poet had been slighted by the commissioning of Fields’s “Ode,” but her objections to the inauguration ceremonies went deeper.27 Her review went on to complain of the performance aesthetic of the entire occasion and indeed of “organ music in general,” which apparently no ode could have redeemed for her. “Whatever [the organ’s] volume of sound,” Howe complained, “it has nothing like the volume of meaning which an orchestra gives us”: [In an orchestra,] The thrill and consensus of each of these human hearts has its part in the combined melody, and the appeal they make to our answering hearts is direct and urgent. But the organist has but one power and affects us as one, though stops and pedals would make him seem to be one hundred. Commend me to the strings and the brasses. I love the sudden zeal of the cymbals and the prudent, timely interference of the hero with the kettle drums. The organ is

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like a single light multiplied in an hundred mirrors. The orchestra is an hundred lights, all concentrated upon one circumstance of Divine Art. Give me the hundred lights, I say. Howe’s review pointedly rejects Annie Fields’s attempt to unify and aestheticize Boston’s history in the image of the great organ and rejects as well Fields’s image of the solitary musician as the animating spirit of Boston’s great organ, ideal image of Boston’s civic life, and herald of victory in the Civil War.28 On closer examination, it makes a certain kind of sense that the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” should have abominated the performance of Fields’s “Ode,” along with that of the great organ itself, as antidemocratic and unfaithful to the political and religious traditions of Boston. The abiding power of “The Battle Hymn,” after all, lies in its conscription of thundering Puritan biblical eloquence to celebrate the North’s mass national discipline in the Civil War: a discipline for which the massed orchestra, not the solitary organ, is the musical equivalent.29 “I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps”—“Give me the hundred lights”; “They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps”—not indoors in the Music Hall. Fields in her “Ode” wants to locate the military power of the North in Boston’s moral-aesthetic break from its Puritan origins; Howe in “The Battle Hymn,” by contrast, imagines the Northern armies as inheritors of the Puritan founders in every way except, perhaps, in literal theology.30 The solitary poet at the end of Fields’s “Ode” has a soul sympathetically responsive, yet not “trampled” by base passions; Howe may well have felt that this would-be civic poet was no match for the soldiers “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored” in her own “Battle Hymn.” Indeed, Howe may well have regarded the entire occasion of the organ inauguration as an effront to the massed armies of the Republic, whose suffering male bodies by the hundreds and thousands, Howe’s review implies, were obscured by that of the lone actress on the Music Hall’s stage reciting Annie Fields’s words.31 Followed as it was by the dim reception of Asphodel, Fields’s anonymously published novel of 1866, Julia Ward Howe’s harsh reception of the 1863 “Ode,” as Fields’s biographer Judith Roman suggests, may have dampened Fields’s ardor for public recognition as a poet, especially in the civic sphere she had tried to claim in the “Ode.” “I can live the poem I would write,” she wrote in a journal entry of 1868; “let me do it then and thank God!”32 She published a scattering of magazine poems semianonymously (under the initials of her married or her maiden names) from the late 1860s through the 1870s and continued to draft poems in her poetry notebooks (now preserved at the Huntington

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Library). The arrangement of the earliest of the unpublished poetry notebooks, dated 1857–64, suggests that she may have tried during these years to keep track of her magazine poetry, together with unpublished poems, as part of a larger corpus of work.33 The death of Annie Fields’s mother in March 1877, however, closely followed by James Fields’s decline and death in 1881, seems to have redirected Annie Fields’s ambitious energies back toward publishing her poetry in book form. What is more, Fields marked not only her reentry into ambitious published poetry but her eventual departure from it with efforts in a very specific genre, that of the pastoral masque. In 1877 Fields wrote and privately printed a “dramatic sketch,” The Return of Persephone, dedicated to the memory of her mother; in 1881 she included this poem in her first collection of verse, Under the Olive, published by Houghton Mifflin. Some twenty years later, Fields would mark the end of her poetic career with another work in the same genre: Orpheus: A Masque, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1900—her final published book of poetry. Biographically speaking, the years bracketed by these two masques, 1877 to 1900, were also, of course, the years during which Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett came to know one another and to unite their lives, and during which their joint salon at 148 Charles Street flourished. The striking literary-historical suggestiveness of this bracketing, I think, lies in how perfectly the generic form of the pastoral masque answers to and reflects upon the performance space of Annie Fields’s salon as a site of female lyric production. Closet verse drama, of course, was a very widespread (one hesitates to say “popular”) genre of ambitious nineteenth-century Anglo-American poetry. In characterizing Fields’s verse dramas more particularly as pastoral masques, I am following the lead Fields herself provided in so labeling her Orpheus but also surmising that Annie Fields in her turn followed other examples among her own contemporaries; Longfellow, for example, in 1875 published The Masque of Pandora, which actually had a brief stage run at the Boston Theatre.34 (Longfellow’s masque may well have helped prompt Annie Fields to venture on a translation of Goethe’s Pandora, which she worked on in 1877 and published in Under the Olive in 1881.) Most important, however, I am pointing to Fields’s observance of the central conventions of the genre in both Orpheus and The Return of Persephone, inasmuch as both poems combine dramatic dialogue among mythological personages with indications of song and dance (in Fields’s stage directions, although never realized in performance). By generic definition, masques interpolate lyric poems into a dramatic plot; they provide lyric with a story that motivates lyric performance

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and a setting in which that performance takes place. The masque as a genre thus provides a special opportunity, even a special provocation, to lyric poets interested in reflecting upon the conditions of lyric performance. As we have already seen in the case of Lucretia Davidson’s “Amir Khan” and Frances Harper’s Moses, nineteenth-century American women poets often interpolated lyric poems into longer narrative poems that allowed them to frame, explore, and sometimes contest women’s overdetermined generic identification with the lyric; Annie Fields is by no means alone in using the masque, or masquelike poetic genres, to the end of such reflection.35 Furthermore, the masque in its classic aristocratic Renaissance performance circumstances was of course a drama of power whose pastoral spectacle mirrored and complemented the presence of its audience, with whom its players merged in mutual recognition at the end. When nineteenth-century women salon poets like Annie Fields adopt or allude to the masque as a form, they are obviously signaling their claims to writing a classically learned poetry, but even more particularly, a learned performance poetry presenting its audience with an idealized mirror of their own social relations of literate power. How widely Annie Fields read in Renaissance masques generally is not certain, but of her acquaintance with at least one there is no doubt. A charming vignette from her diary of 1868 has her sitting down with James Fields to read “Milton before breakfast, that passage where virtue is called upon as light in herself to guide the sweet lost maiden.”36 Part of the attraction of Milton’s Comus for Fields may well have lain in Milton’s turning of the Renaissance court masque toward the celebration of female virtue and female education on the private-public stage of the aristocratic family. Annie Fields may have found in Milton’s masque a parallel to and precursor of the social relations of her own late nineteenth-century high-bourgeois salon, ordered around the figure of the performing woman educated in both letters and virtue and her husband-consort, the editor educated by the disinterested virtue of his poet-wife. Located at one remove from civic space—the space Fields had tried and failed to open for her poetry in her “Ode” of 1863—the performance tradition of the pastoral masque nevertheless asserts the wider social consequence of women’s education in letters. The Return of Persephone, Fields’s masque of 1877, is very much a drama of female education—indeed, a double drama of education, as the instructed daughter eventually returns to earth to teach her mother. The travail of aesthetic education that Fields attributed to the city of Boston, in her 1863 “Ode” for the great organ, becomes in Fields’s later masque the more intimate trial of the daughter-goddess’s desire. Fields’s adaptation of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter via Walter Pater37 replaces

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the Hymn’s opening focus on the male gods—A¨ıdoneus abducting Persephone with the consent of Zeus—with a mother-daughter scene of instruction. As Fields imagines the goddesses sitting over their embroidery, Persephone invokes her mother specifically as her artistic teacher, an instructor in representational technique as well as feeling: Mother, thou teachest all things to thy child, All she would know and all this life can need; I pray thee teach me now to blend these threads And weave the magic hues that make the sky; Teach me to simulate blown grain, and more, Far more, to paint the light in human eyes, When joy transforms or pity bids them weep.38 Demeter herself replies, however, that Persephone’s artistic education is still incomplete, but in ways her mother cannot amend: not in the technique of the needle, nor in earthly “circumstance” of time and change, but in lacking a Keatsian synthesis of feeling that would animate technique and sense: My daughter, I give all the earth can give! This warp and woof of dusky circumstance, These lovely figures changing endlessly, Gilded by fancy, painted by a dream; Further, the needle of thine industry, By use grown sharp, obedient to thy need. Thou lackest yet one thing, therefore I go To watch and to instruct my laborers, While thou here, sitting, in thine heart revolve How joy and grief spring from one common root . . . (144) Ironically, Demeter’s prescription for her daughter’s artistic education will be fulfilled by Persephone’s marriage to A¨ıdoneus in the underworld. Fields in effect makes Demeter announce in advance the meaning of Persephone’s trials in the underworld; in her telling, the autonomous requirements of Persephone’s own aesthetic and moral education, rather than the will of Zeus or the lust of Dis, will determine the course of the plot. The needlework she sits to is “a shining mantle” intended for her mother, “To prove thy child doth love thee, and would strive / To add a brightness to thy glorious shape” (144–45). The aesthetic success of her own bright handiwork, however, not only makes “the wind seem[ ] to breathe among these reeds / Which the swift needle plants beside the wave” but also prompts her to realize “The living heaven gazing from

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many a star” and “the little globe whereon we sit,” both globe and stars imagined as “a flame, a quenchless spark, / Planted in a homeless dark” (145). Thus it is Persephone herself, pondering the significance of her own needlework, who asks Zeus to educate her about “how light is made, to sink and deepen into dark” (146), a relationship heretofore undiscerned in her ambition to add brightness upon her mother’s brightness. Shown the “sacred places of Dis,” she realizes—“too soon,” she says—that this is indeed the end of all her art: “Swiftly doth the needle pass / Over the full-ripened grass, / Through yon river’s deathcold swell” (146). Resisting the vision, Persephone abandons herself to the song and dance of a chorus of nymphs; fleeing its darkness, she faints in the sun and is gathered into Dis by a gentle A¨ıdoneus, there to come to terms with darkness. In her absence, Demeter reluctantly learns to extend her sympathies beyond her daughter by nursing the human infant Demophoon. ¨ “Breathe, breathe, and suck the milk of my warm breast!” she tells the infant, inviting him in song to “Drink the warm milk of my late tenderness / Grown greater for the sorrows I have known” (172). Demeter’s sympathy, however, even in this greatened form, can only be shown by literal, bodily, jealous maternal caring—whether expressed as milk or in her efforts to give Demophoon ¨ bodily immortality. Persephone in Dis, however, by dint of her husband’s love, learns a fuller, twofold lesson. In Sarah Sherman’s words, “Persephone’s mature wisdom surpasses the narrow range of her mother’s affection,” extending beyond her own kin to a disinterested care for all living things; moreover, Persephone has assimilated the philosophical and aesthetic perspective in which natural cycles of death and rebirth witness to the unending renewal of beauty— “Nor yet the same, but evermore renewed, / With the old love in a diviner form” (184).39 One way of understanding The Return of Persephone as a drama of female instruction is to set it alongside the mid-nineteenth-century schoolroom space of poetic performance as we have already seen Fields represent it. If the schoolteacher of Fields’s anecdote demands to know what the tapestry of the Lady of Shalott means, where “means” would mean moral-didactic paraphrase, The Return of Persephone presents its heroine as another female weaver, one more fortunate in her teachers than is Tennyson’s Lady—or Annie Fields in her recollection of her schooling. I suggested earlier that beyond the performance space of the classroom, as represented in Fields’s classroom anecdote, there had to stand another space, that of the late nineteenth-century haute-bourgeois lettered home. The Return of Persephone dramatizes that home’s emergent regime of high culture through generic form at least as much as through thematic statement. Not only does Persephone’s aesthetic and

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philosophical education thematically critique and extend the narrower, more literally maternal sympathies of her mother, the very form of the pastoral masque performatively distances The Return of Persephone as a scene of female instruction from the sentimental-domestic didactic novels of Annie Fields’s literary “mothers,” the slightly older generation of women writers whom she variously hosted, eulogized, and critiqued in her salon and in her literary writings. To understand The Return of Persephone in these literary-historical terms, as (virtually) an allegory of the supersession of one generation of women writers by another, is not exactly to reject the more familiar biographical readings—beginning with Fields’s own dedication of the poem to the memory of her mother—that see Persephone as elegy for her mother, reflection on her marriage with James T. Fields,40 and anticipation of the mother-daughter configuration of Fields’s relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett. It is, however, to point out how thoroughly Annie Fields understood and experienced both fields, that of intimate familial relations and that of culture, in terms of a similar emotional logic of substitution conceived as aesthetic progress. Call it the logic of cultural transmission or, after Lacan, the logic of the Symbolic; construed either way, The Return of Persephone scripts and resolves the aesthetic education of its heroine along the lines of heterosexual imperative, with the daughter distancing herself from the mother and marrying herself not only to a fatherly male but through him to culture itself. Fields’s manuscript poetry notebooks from the 1860s and 1870s, however, suggest her troubled awareness of what could go astray in The Return of Persephone’s configuration of aesthetic education as heterosexual romance. A sequence of associated drafts and fragments of two poems on the theme of lost daughters and wandering mothers, “Perdita” and “The Wanderer,” trails through the notebooks, as if the goddesses of Fields’s masque had escaped the heterosexual resolution of the myth or lived on to ask what work it left undone. “The Wanderer” never appeared in print; in this poem, an unidentified speaker accosts a wandering “lady” (or “traveller,” in Fields’s emendation) who initially seems a version of Demeter as earth mother, wandering the earth in search of her lost daughter: O lady ⬍traveller⬎ turn aside thy gentle feet, The cruel plow hath cut thy blossoms down, Clover, wild roses, and tall meadowsweet In their fresh beauty are all overthrown; Nor canst thou find the tiny pathway more That led thee wandering from shore to shore ’Tis true, she answered, all my flowers are laid

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Fast, fast asleep beneath the good brown mould; ’Tis true, the path by guiding footsteps made Has vanished underneath the ploughshare’s fold; But ⬍yet⬎ calm now I see where one hath gone Before me, and I follow on alone.41 This searching mother, however, unlike the Demeter of The Return of Persephone, has abandoned hope of literally recovering her natural losses. In this Christianized version of the myth, she now follows not her daughter’s track but that of “the spirit through the deeps of air,” Miltonically upborne “ ‘By the dear might of Him who walked the waves.’ ” Here it is Christ rather than Persephone who “once wandered into Hell’s vast night” and made of it an aesthetic education—who “borrowed the hues of earth / And painted with them blossoms of heavenly birth.” The mother adopts God the Son in the place of her lost “blossoms,” but the result for her is neither rest nor ease nor reunion but perpetual wandering. What lingers from the poem is less its lookedfor Christian resolution than its portrait of female desire, unhinged from the naturalistic literal bonds of motherhood, as vagrant and intransitive rather than disciplined to the transmission of culture. The notebooks’ companion poem to “The Wanderer” is “Perdita,” Fields’s exploration of the lost daughter, bereft of her mother. “Perdita” appeared in Fields’s 1895 volume, The Singing Shepherd, as a chaste sonnet: Alone across the silver-fretted skies Walked the white moon; attendant wreaths of cloud Wrapt her still steps, and downward to the sea Her shadowed light descended brokenly; A sad and lonely sight unto her eyes That joyful watched the day-spring’s promise proud, Then saw day fade in dark, and mists enshroud The path wherein the pallid moon must rise. Perdita, standing on the night-black marge, Gazed down upon the waters’ constant change, Shuddering with fear before that passage strange Over the ocean’s dark uncertain floor; She saw no rudder in the waiting barge, No beaconing light upon that farther shore.42 Fields had long before recorded this version of “Perdita” as a sonnet in her notebooks, dating it to May 16, 1880.43 In other versions, however, “Perdita” had appeared in Fields’s notebooks as early as 1866; clearly,

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then, Fields’s identification with Hermione’s lost daughter in The Winter’s Tale preceded the loss of her own mother in 1877. The published sonnet seems to gloss the scene in The Winter’s Tale in which Perdita stands in waiting while Florizel settles with his father’s adviser Camillo to evade the wrath of his father, Polixenes, wrath by setting sail for Sicilia, where he will throw himself on the mercy of Leontes, king of Sicilia and his father’s former friend (IV.4). Florizel’s appearance with Perdita, Camillo believes, will reconcile Leontes to Polixenes, and in the joy of reunion Polixenes will reconcile himself to Florizel’s shepherdess bride: Methinks I see Leontes opening his free arms and weeping His welcomes forth; asks thee the son forgiveness, As ’twere i’ th’ father’s person; kisses the hands Of your fresh princess; o’er and o’er divides him ’Twixt his unkindness and his kindness; th’ one He chides to hell and bids the other grow Faster than thought or time. (The Winter’s Tale IV.4.546–53) Although neither Florizel nor Perdita realizes it in this moment, the encounter Camillo advises as “A course more promising / Than a wild dedication of yourselves / To unpathed waters, undreamed shores” (IV.4.565–67) will eventually reunite Leontes and Perdita as daughter and father, Hermione and Leontes as husband and wife, and, finally, Perdita and Hermione as the mother and daughter lost to one another at birth. Perdita says almost nothing in this scene that decides her course toward (what she does not yet know as) her birthplace. “I’ll blush you thanks,” she says in reponse to Camillo’s praise of her demeanor (IV.4.583) and obediently bundles herself into the male clothing pressed on her so that she may make her way to Florizel’s waiting ship undetected; “I see the play so lies / That I must bear a part,” she concedes, and departs (IV.4.653–54). Indeed, Perdita says almost nothing in any of the following scenes of recognition, in which her bodily likeness to her mother rather speaks for her; although it is Perdita’s desire to see her mother’s statue that brings the royal party to view it, her last words in the play have her “Stand[ing] by, a looker on” (V.3.84–85), at her mother’s statue. The plot of The Winter’s Tale is famously evocative of the myth of Ceres and Proserpina (in the words of one of its recent editors, “a kind of inversion of the myth of Ceres”),44 and the form of Shakespeare’s romance, with its revelation of Hermione as statue-turned-life at the end, clearly owes a debt to the pastoral masque. For all these reasons,

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Fields’s interest in The Winter’s Tale seems doubly congruent with her own rewriting of the Ceres-Proserpina myth in masque form as The Return of Persephone.45 “Perdita” in Fields’s sonnet, however, anticipates nothing of the reunion that is to come, nor does she seem to have a share either in Persephone’s girlish art of the needle or her mature aesthetic philosophy, as Fields pictures it in the masque, of the everlasting union of death with formal renewal. Shakespeare’s Perdita, playing “mistress o’ th’ feast” costumed as a shepherdess, famously calls upon Proserpina “For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall / From Dis’s wagon,” that she might deck her beloved in them (IV.4.116–18). Fields’s Perdita, by contrast, stands alone at the shore where she was first abandoned, in a moment of transition between her morning’s glad pastoral and what will be the more difficult magic of time worked in the play’s following act. Contemplating “the waters’ constant change” while fearing to trust herself to the constancy imaged by change, Fields’s Perdita cannot see either in herself or in the constant renewal of the waves the reassurance of stillness in motion that Florizel relies on in her doings: “When you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do /Nothing but that, move still, still so, / And own no other function” (IV.4.140–43). “Perdita” in its published sonnet form points to Perdita’s terror as the hidden price of the family reunion that closes The Winter’s Tale. In a sense, Fields’s sonnet interpolates itself as a lyric into a masque in this case not of her own making, the one that ends Shakespeare’s play, and supplies the pathos that Shakespeare does not give in so many words to Perdita in his last scene, where she kneels in silence to receive her mother’s blessing, given to her (at Paulina’s behest) after Leontes and Hermione have embraced but before husband and wife speak to one another. The sonnet’s speechless desolation highlights Perdita’s silence at the end of The Winter’s Tale: “interpose[d],” in Pauline’s directive, between husband and wife, the silent daughter both separates and connects them. The reunions that restore continuity to royal lineages, royal marriages, and male friendships still leave in suspense, Fields’s sonnet suggests, the issue of what recognition passes from daughter to mother. In the poem’s earlier and far stranger manuscript versions, however, Fields imagined “Perdita” not only as a dramatic monologue in Perdita’s own voice but as a perverse variation on that favorite nineteenthcentury American poetic topos, the seaside driftwood poem.46 From its beginning, in a fragment dated August 20, 1866, as “Stranded,” the poem started as an apostrophe to “a tree found on the beach”; it then acquired an epigraph—“Wilt thou not speak to me, and say what news?”—before finally emerging as an extended monologue, titled “Perdita,” addressed to a trunk of driftwood:

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Lonely I listen to the measured beat Of waves that question up and down the sands; Some message by their swift returning feet My heart would gather from ⬍those⬎ the far green lands But only this scarred tree-trunk ⬍wandering⬎ lost Comes tossing shoreward sent by sun and frost. Thou bearest from the leaf embowered shore Where sway the plumed trees! Dost fear curlews Swooping and shrieking to the ocean’s roar? What memories hast thou? Let me read thy speech Thou ragged trunk wrecked on this windy beach.47 A castaway herself, wandering “companionless . . . by the main,” the speaker in this poem is not certain of what question to address to the driftwood trunk. “Dost thou remember when a child I stood / Perchance beside thee in our leafy homes,” asks one stanza, as if of the vagrant mother in Fields’s “The Wanderer”; “Was joy not ours then that thou didst roam / And trust thy beauty to the faceless deep”? Another stanza questions whether the log can “tell of flowerful chasms and sun-dark dells,” in contrast to the speaker’s “windy beach”; “Or hast thou tales to tell of Italy?” asks another, or perhaps of Thessaly—“What past murmured secrets to thy grove?”—while still another stanza imagines the log disclosing “if maple branches still / Shadow two lovers, mingling tone with tone, / Till their book fell and lo! two hearts are one.” Fields’s Perdita in this poem strays much further from her Winter’s Tale original than in the sonnet version of “Perdita,” and indeed seems to condense elements of other seaborne, shipwrecked Shakespearean romance heroines—Miranda, Marina—in her plaint. What seas, what shores, could a spindrift log able to answer her questions possibly have come from? Perdita’s apostrophe to the “scarred trunk,” in the sheer variety and incoherence of the variously personal, literary, and mythic “memories” she tries to elicit from it, suggests that she seeks to call into being a mother, a father, even a lover in the log; to constitute not only an entire family history from deadwood, but to father—or mother—all of culture on the log, so that it, it turn, might recognize and love her. Yet Perdita’s monologue fails to deliver her into the conventions of pastoral romance—“dead root, thou know’st not love!” The log, failed pastoral, cannot recognize her and leaves her to her task of gathering the “barren feast” left by “the white lipped waves.” But does this outcome signal the failure of cultural transmission, or its apotheosis? It may be useful here to recall that “Perdita” in its unpublished manuscript version dates back to 1866, the year when the cold reception of

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her anonymously published novel Asphodel brought back to Annie Fields her sense of injury over the reception of her “Ode” for the great organ.48 The literary orts and scraps of Perdita’s repeated apostrophe to the “scarred trunk” of driftwood perversely affirm her success in constituting culture as what does not recognize her back, to which she has only the reply of intransitive love, love without an answering object, purely disinterested love. In its more fragmentary way, Fields’s 1866 manuscript “Perdita” renders a version of the aesthetic education that will be more fully and optimistically elaborated in the mythology of the 1877 Return of Persephone. The human scenes that castaway Perdita conjours up from her driftwood trunk echo those that Persephone threads into her tapestry when left alone by her mother, but Persephone is more fortunate than Perdita in having both a mother and a father-lover to mediate the love that eventually transcends her mother’s too concrete, too particular, too possessive sympathies. Fields returned to Persephone’s themes of aesthetic education, as well as to Persephone’s generic form, in her final published book of poetry, Orpheus: A Masque (1900). Like the earlier masque, Orpheus frames its story of aesthetic education in terms of the opposition between narrowly particular loves and more general, formalized, and aestheticized sympathies. But the gendering of Fields’s theme shifts in Orpheus, as does the outcome. Here it is the male poet Orpheus, rather than the daughter Persephone, who undergoes a trial of his aesthetic sympathies, and whose trial ends in failure—a failure, however, that leaves women to inherit the task of reassembling and reanimating culture. Fields’s Orpheus opens after Eurydice’s death, with the poet’s voice stilled by his grief. Rather than send Orpheus directly to the underworld after her, following Ovid (Metamorphoses X), Fields interjects a mother figure—Dione, mother of Aphrodite—to remonstrate with Orpheus over his abandoing his vocation: Dione Yet the gods call thee! Must indeed all life Droop and go to waste because thy heart is sad! Wilt thou not hear them from the field and hill Piping and whispering, longing for thy lyre Yet daring not to ask? Orpheus

Too well they know I cannot play again! When she was here Music became the tongue to voice love’s thought; Now love himself is dead; or if not dead, He vanished with my own Eurydice.49

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Not possessive love herself, fittingly, but the mother of love (“Mother of lovers am I,” she tells Orpheus, “and many woes / These eyes have seen” [5]), Dione in Orpheus takes up the role Persephone eventually assumes in The Return of Persephone, making the argument for an aesthetic vocation that subsumes particular griefs in a more general music of pastoral sympathy. Dione’s argument takes on Christian overtones, as well as literary-historical ambition, in her Dantesque appeal to Orpheus to remember “the great ones who have loved / As thou canst not. . . . They drew her to their peace” (4). Orpheus, however, refuses to tune his lyre to elegy, insisting instead on Eurydice’s literal return. Advised by Dione to “Take thine own lyre and chant thy song of love” to smooth his entrance into the underworld, Orpheus goes on his way singing for Eurydice’s voice to return to him. Confronted by a troop of dancing bacchantes on his way, he rejects the “rhythmic step” of their whirling song; the poetry of “finest sense” (12) does not tempt him who hangs Like a suspended sense ’twixt earth and heaven To hear a finer music, nor can give Save what is whispered me. (14) Convinced that Eurydice herself “Must mourn because I drown in misery” (7), Orpheus on arriving in the underworld hopes to locate her with his song. Notably, Fields here omits the appeal that Ovid has Orpheus make to Persephone and “him who rules those unlovely realms” (Metamorphoses X.15–16),50 as if to say that the message of the gods had already been given Orpheus on earth, by Dione, to heed or not to heed. Rather than ask the gods of the underworld to return Eurydice to him, Orpheus appeals to her directly to hear him as he confesses to his silence as a poet of earth after her death, and asks for rest in her arms: At dawn I could not find thy face! In the great music, all the grace Of love that filled these willing hands With labor in the harvest lands Awoke no canticles of praise. . . . . . . . . . . . This hour is thine and mine! The gateway of the world behind me lies Shut; now am I free To throw me in thine arms and rest and weep Beyond the sphere of sleep. (15–16)

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It is not Eurydice, however, who responds immediately to Orpheus’s song. Instead, he finds a crowd of Dantesque purgatorial shades, some of them familiar faces despite their “misshapen” figures bent by “undue burdens,” “drawing towards me full of eager hope” (17). Rather than reaching toward them in sympathy, Orpheus recoils from what he takes to be their “jealousy that one should see them thus / And live and carry back the bitter tale / Into the realms where men yet live and love” (17– 18). The failure of love, however, as Orpheus slowly realizes, is the burden that he himself has brought with him to the underworld, and it can only be lightened by his pausing on his own quest to “help them with their burthens for a space” (18): Slow I see Truth’s awful eye Like a dim, unsetting sun, Gazing from eternity On my life undone! Whither, whither, from this blight May I turn to find the light? Long my disobedient heart, Wandering in a maze of grief, Wilfully has dwelt apart, Dead as autumn’s leaf! Blind, rebellious, have I been. Now I see and know my sin! (19–20) On their behalf, now, as well as his own, Orpheus asks the shades for help in finding Eurydice: “She could drive / Evil even from these gates / And your hearts revive!” (20). The shades reply to Orpheus in dactylic hexameter—“Hollow and strange are the voices that echo in these dark dominions” (20)—a classical meter that formally suggests, along with Fields’s Dantesque echoes, that Orpheus, all unknowingly, is coming close to performing a Christian harrowing of a classical hell. But Orpheus’s song has drawn Eurydice to him, and he turns away from the shades as she approaches with her own song. He begs her not to “Fade . . . again from me!” but her first words to him are of the shades: Where are the sufferers, They who were with thee, Troop of the woe-worn? Wert thou not pleading How out of darkness,

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Through grief and repentence, And grace of Olympos, Their hearts should be changed? Too great was thy labor For one newly born! I listened, I pleaded, I carried thy prayer up To lighten thy burden And show thee the path; Where have they vanished? I see them not, Orpheus. (23–24) With Eurydice restored to him, as he believes, Orpheus cares nothing for the vanished shades, even though Eurydice herself tells him that “The way of renewal, / The pathway of love” (27) lies through his newly discovered poetry of sympathy with pain. In Fields’s retelling of the myth, it is not Orpheus who looks back into the underworld after Eurydice, and so loses her; it is Eurydice herself who demands that Orpheus look back upon the shades “Wailing in anguish” and extend his love of her to them. Failing to persuade Orpheus, Eurydice with deliberation (in Fields’s stage directions) “disengages herself from him” and returns to the underworld. Understanding too late Eurydice’s effort to “lead me to my finer self” (31), Orpheus struggles to win her forgiveness but finds himself stranded between singing an empty idealization of his former love (“an unknown height / In the lone night”) and the more vigorous and earthy song of the bacchantes. Orpheus yields to their dance, only to be drawn out of it by the hermit thrush, whose song he echoes—in two-beat, tightly rhymed, Emersonian lines: Born of the dark, Music is mine, Music and wine; Child of the spark, Born into pain, Thine shall remain The loss and the gain. Children of earth, The hour of death, The hour of birth, Slow is the coming, Awful the breath. (38)

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This earth-song proves to be Orpheus’s last, as the bacchantes reject his “broken measure,” realizing that his love and loss have “poisoned pleasure’s very root.” They rend his limbs and cast him on the waves; the Muses tenderly gather up the relics and bear them away in a funeral procession of “The immortal chorus, chorus hymeneal.” Formally speaking, Orpheus reads as a small-scale dramatic anthology of mainstream nineteenth-century American poetics, from its carefully correct blank verse dialogues through ballad stanzas, dactylic hexameters after Longfellow, and the rude Emersonian earth-song on which Orpheus ends. Might Annie Fields indeed have been taking stock of her century’s poetry at the century’s end? Her 1877 Return of Persephone, I have suggested, implicitly seeks to separate generations of nineteenth-century American women writers, to extend the range of women’s sympathies beyond the maternal (or the model of maternity) and, at the same time, to grant them a more consciously high-aesthetic form in classically informed poetry. Orpheus seems to turn its energies in the other direction; Orpheus’s failed aesthetic education at Eurydice’s hands suggests that Fields saw nineteenth-century American male poetics as also in need of a certain correction: a widening of sympathies beyond jealously particular, interested loves, a remembering of pastoral duty toward suffering souls. Fields performed the latter in her charitable work as well as in her poetry; the former was the social and aesthetic ethos of her own salon. Like the Muses at the end of her Orpheus, she was a gatherer-up in her salon as well as in her published writings.51 Imaging culture as the scattered remains of Orpheus floating down the stream or as the “scarred trunk” washed ashore in her manuscript version of “Perdita,” Fields clearly believed it was a woman’s work, and indeed her lifework, to hail culture’s fragments, scraps, and driftwood into coherence in the name of disinterested love. Never intended for actual stage production, Orpheus: A Masque nevertheless establishes the idealized space of its production and reception: an autonomous and timeless space constituted by the perfect coincidence of production and reception, the high cultural space of her own salon. That idealized coincidence of production and reception, of course, is exactly what we cannot now experience in reading Annie Fields’s poetry. If we make an effort to follow Fields into her hailing of nineteenthcentury American culture in Orpheus, we are likely to notice that the office it designates for woman’s work in high culture is filled by a dead woman, Eurydice—or, in the frontispiece to Orpheus, by a classical bas-relief of a woman with a lyre, Sappho or a Muse (figure 6.1), as if Hermione had aspired to step back into sculpture at the close of The Winter’s Tale. Did Annie Fields herself, we may wonder, ever ponder the costs of so marmoreal a self-fashioning?

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Figure 6.1 Frontispiece, Annie Fields, Orpheus: A Masque (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900).

One of Fields’s late lyrics, published in The Singing Shepherd as “The River Charles,” pays tribute to her idealized Boston by means of the familiar topos of the river of eloquence or song. Fields had every reason to feel that the great fluvium of her century’s Cambridge and Boston had murmured past her own door at 148 Charles Street, indeed, through her own chambers in the form of her celebrated salon. In its published version, “The River Charles” from its opening to its close offers a grateful apostrophe to the river: Thou has been unto me a gracious nurse, Telling me many a tale in listening hours

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Of those who praised thee with their ripening powers, Our elder poets, nourished at thy source. O happy Cambridge meadows! where now rest Forever the proud memories of their lives; O happy Cambridge air! forever blest With deathless song the bee of time still hives . . . (The Singing Shepherd, 148) In the published version of the poem, the speaker of “The River Charles” asks nothing for herself but to be the untroubled medium through which the deathless river flows, the transparent last link in a perfect chain of cultural transmission, cleansed of living particularity at second hand, by means of the river’s passage through the great poets. “Fortunate river! that through the poet’s thought / Hast run and washed life’s burden from his sight; / . . . thou his song has brought, / And thou shalt live in poetry and light” (150). The manuscript version of the poem, however, preserved in Fields’s poetry notebooks at the Huntington Library, discloses that Fields’s published hymn to the pure transmission of culture emerged out of a profoundly discreet but troubled late-night, late-life love poem. The love poem declares itself, in the poem’s manuscript opening stanza, only by means of a first-person plural pronoun: Beside our river flowing to the sea Which sleeps as if unmindful of its fate To rise and fall and sink at last in thee Great ocean! thine both early and late; . . . —and the love poem reemerges for a moment in the manuscript poem’s conclusion, as the speaker’s apostrophe moves without remark, resistance, or protest from the face of the river to the face of her beloved. “Give me but ears to hear,” she asks of the river, “and I will rest”— Rest in the night where the cool arms of sleep Have left me wakeful gazing in thy face; And rest unsung when the dear eyes that weep Have vanished into joy from time and place What troubles the manuscript love poem more clearly than the published version of “The River Charles” seems to be the speaker’s literary ambitions. The river, “unmindful of its fate” (and, in a later manuscript stanza, “unmindful of the wreck of earthly powers”), does not regret that its destiny is to join the ocean; the speaker does regret her own “dull” soul and “speechless” lips, both as they keep her from inheriting the Charles at first hand and as her unsatisfied ambitions keep her wake-

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fully out of her lover’s bed. As if deliberately to underline the disjunction between the manuscript poem’s wakeful scene of enunciation and its appeal for rest, Fields subscribed this notebook version of the poem with time and place: “Sunday Aug 11th ’95 148 Charles St.”52 According to Fields’s published poem, the mission of the Charles, great nurse of nineteenth-century American poetry, is to wash life’s burdens from the poet’s sight. Most later readers will probably join me in preferring the manuscript version of the poem as just a little more unwashed, just a little more inflected by regret. For many later readers, myself included, the manuscript “Charles” will also gather pathos and legibility from its association with a historical repression, the elision of Annie Fields’s intensely intimate erotic relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett—a relationship that Fields herself, who survived her younger partner, eventually collaborated in diminishing.53 Even in its manuscript version, however, the poem’s central act of repression is not so much the poet’s elision of the gendered erotic body of her beloved as what seems to be her decision not to awaken her beloved: she holds back from asking of those eyes the recognition not granted by the river. Without setting the historical pathos of Jewett’s and Fields’s sexuality entirely aside, I would still want to insist on how thoroughly Fields implicates her own desire, even in the manuscript poem, with the pathos of cultural transmission.

CONCLUSION

The Sentiments of Recovery: Adrienne Rich and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Culture

When she imagined herself, in 1895, looking out upon the Charles River as upon Boston’s idealized stream of culture, Annie Fields could in her mind’s eye have seen on the banks of the river separating Boston from Cambridge two institutions of higher learning open to women in whose founding she had played a small role: the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College) and Boston University. Like all of the women poets in From School to Salon—with the one equivocal exception of Emily Dickinson and her difficult year at Mount Holyoke—Annie Fields herself had no formal higher education, although she praised and envied the training available at the most classically rigorous among the emerging women’s colleges of the United States.1 The pathos of exclusion traced in “The River Charles” thus had its institutional component, which Fields felt deeply, above and beyond her own personal literary disappointments and despite the social access she enjoyed to Boston’s most prestigious scenes of literary culture, access secured to her first through her marriage to James T. Fields and then through the success of her salon over many years. In this respect, Fields stands at a major historical cusp: to think of the generations of better-known women poets immediately succeeding her in the twentieth century is to realize how swiftly and decisively middleclass women occupied the university as a locus of access to authorship in poetry, and how many of them began beating out the paths—little magazines, postcollege residence in urban bohemias, journalism—linking the university and its curricula to different positions within the literary field. Hilda Doolittle at Bryn Mawr College managed little more than Emily Dickinson’s one year before dropping out, ultimately to become “H. D.”; yet her poetry was clearly marked by the classicism of Bryn Mawr’s curriculum. Marianne Moore, however, completed her degree at Bryn Mawr, and Elizabeth Bishop and Edna St. Vincent Millay theirs at Vassar College. Gertrude Stein went to the Harvard Annex before going on to medical study at Johns Hopkins University, Laura Riding to Cornell University; Georgia Douglas Johnson was among many African American women writers in the early years of the century who attended Howard University, while Gwendolyn Brooks attended

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Wilson Junior College in Chicago; and the rising land-grant institutions conferred degrees on women like Genevieve Taggard at the University of California at Berkeley. As Katherine H. Adams observes, late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century modes of writing instruction in colleges and universities offered aspiring women writers not only instruction in literary canons (in all schools the new vernacular canon of “classic” English and American literature, in the most elite schools the traditional classics of Greek and Latin as well) but also entry into new social relations of writing. In college writing courses, “teachers often used a workshop format to imitate a newspaper office or a publishing house” and “often allowed students to experiment with the genres studied in class,” including poetry; many women students then took the collective and sometimes preprofessional disposition of their writing classes into work on “college magazines and newspaper offices, literary clubs, and theatre groups.”2 Women’s entry in numbers into higher education thus provided American women writers with an expanding set of institutional supplements to the informal social relations and modes of cultural transmission associated with the late nineteenth-century salon. To consider this sea change in the social location of American women’s poetry is one way of extending the concerns of From School to Salon forward—of seeing around its nineteenth-century historical corner toward the present. One consequence of the large-scale entry of American women into both higher education and allied social relations of writing at the turn of the nineteenth century is that twentieth-century American women poets in increasing numbers found it possible to become intellectuals in Pierre Bourdieu’s historically specific sense of that role. In Bourdieu’s definition, rooted in French intellectual politics and social history, Intellectuals are paradoxical beings who cannot be thought of as such as long as they are apprehended through the obligatory alternative between autonomy and commitment, between pure culture and politics. This is because intellectuals are constituted, historically, in and through their overcoming of that opposition: writers, artists and scholars asserted themselves for the first time as intellectuals, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, when they intervened in political life as intellectuals, meaning with a specific authority founded on their belonging to the relatively autonomous world of art, science and literature, and on all the values associated with that autonomy—disinterestedness, expertise, etc.3 The historical turn constituting American women poets as intellectuals in Bourdieu’s terms certainly came no later than the 1927 trial and execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, when Edna St. Vin-

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cent Millay joined many other American writers in giving voice to her outrage with a poem, “Justice Denied in Massachusetts.”4 The execution, and Millay’s and other poets’ responses to it, set the pattern for subsequent events in the first part of the century—including the Scottsboro trial, economic struggle in the Great Depression, and the Spanish civil war—that would define this generation of modernist women poets as intellectuals in the full modern sense, agents of “political action[s] whose ends and means have their origin in the specific logic of the fields of cultural production” (The Rules of Art, 340). This is not to say, of course, that women poets did not address social issues or take up social advocacy before the early twentieth century, nor that they did so in ways uninformed by knowledge and their own institutional authority, in some cases, as teachers. As we have seen, Lydia Sigourney’s Traits of the Aborigines of America (1822) mounted a conspicuously learned brief on behalf of Native Americans; Helen Hunt Jackson accompanied her writing of Ramona with historical research into the relations between the United States and Native tribes; Maria Lowell’s abolitionist poetry was often highly allusive and learned, as was that of Frances Harper, although in different cultural registers, both before the Civil War and during Reconstruction. Theirs was a different mode of social advocacy than that of twentieth-century women poets and intellectuals, however, with origins in different social relations of writing. Jackson did not understand her Indian activism as the extension of a specific authority grounded in her poetry’s ambitions to attain the world of aesthetic autonomy; indeed, her poetic career ended with her conversion to social agency. Frances Harper grounded her poetics in the African American community’s political struggles and institutions, especially the church and the school, rather than in a secular world of aesthetic autonomy. Sigourney’s socially engaged writing, teacherly vocation, and authorial career took root in the shifting historical sands between early nineteenth-century republican motherhood and the domestic-tutelary complex, only to wither with the growing dominance, after the midcentury, of high autonomous literary culture. Among major nineteenth-century Anglo-American women writers, only Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Barrett Browning grounded their political assertion in their sense of aesthetic autonomy in terms like those of the present day, and they did so outside of institutional contexts. It is only through women writers’ twentieth-century achievement of a historically specific identity as intellectuals that we can be tempted to look back and read the differences between Emily Dickinson and the socially engaged writers of her generation as if the present-day intellectual’s responsibility to put aesthetic autonomy to the ends of political critique were

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already, for Dickinson or her contemporaries, a fully realized social possibility. The twentieth-century making of the American woman poet as intellectual and the feminist scholarly recovery of nineteenth-century American women’s culture in the present-day university converge in Adrienne Rich’s career as a poet and teacher. Born in 1929, Rich attended Radcliffe College, graduated with honors, and has been associated with higher education in various institutions and capacities throughout her career, including Columbia University, the City College of New York, Douglass College of Rutgers University, and Stanford University; she is among the many direct inheritors of that early twentieth-century sea change that relocated American women’s poetry in relation to the university as well as to the sphere of autonomous art. In the 1960s and 1970s, with her involvement in the New Left and the women’s movement, Rich became an early and thoughtful critic of what the university offered to women and how it taught literacies, distributing or withholding cultural capital—a side of her career represented in her essays from 1972 and 1974, “Teaching Language in Open Admissions” and “Toward a Woman-Centered University,” as well as in poems like “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.”5 It was in the later 1970s, when nineteenth-century women’s history and writing began to be “recovered” in force by feminist scholarship, that Rich found herself face-toface with this new subject of knowledge. Rich’s 1981 volume of poems, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, departed significantly from her 1978 The Dream of a Common Language in the degree to which it located precursors for Rich’s twentieth-century literary feminism in the women writers and activists of the nineteenth century brought to light by this feminist scholarship. The interest of this epistemological break in Rich’s career for my reading of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry lies in the exemplary and cautionary force of Rich’s struggles with this inheritance. The new availability of nineteenth-century women’s literary and political history as an object of knowledge6 presented second-wave U.S. feminism not only with a richer ancestry but also with the assortment of literary and political dilemmas that came to cluster, at least for literary historians, around the idea of “sentimentalism.” “Sentimental” was, of course, among the most thoroughly abjected critical epithets in the modernist lexicon, and reactions to nineteenth-century American sentimentalism divided and continue to divide feminist readers, in an ongoing debate much too extensive to summarize here. Scholars setting out to characterize sentimentalism historically soon found themselves in

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rough consensus on its basic features or strategies, including the identification with others by means of sympathy with primal feelings, especially feelings of suffering and loss; the reading of those feelings through the signs of the expressive body, its blushes and tears, met by the reader’s own tears offered up in response; the figurative mapping of the wider social world—including the nation—in terms of intimate familial bonds. Sentimentalism thus broadly understood, many feminist scholars eventually came to agree, was not only a defining characteristic of much nineteenth-century American women’s writing and political activism but also, in Shirley Samuels’s words, “at the heart of nineteenth-century American culture” itself.7 For Adrienne Rich, as a poet rather than a literary historian, the feminist scholarly recovery of nineteenth-century women’s cultures of sentiment demanded that she reexamine the conditions of her own historical possibility as an American feminist poet. For Rich to make poetry out of this newly constituted cultural capital meant turning the new women’s histories at least partially from an object of knowledge into an object of identification. Nineteenth-century women’s cultures of sentiment became for Rich both objects of historical knowledge and a means by which those objects are known; the project of knowing sentiment’s history poetically became a sentimental project insofar as it centered, for Rich, on sympathetic identification with pain. Rich’s poetry since the late 1970s thus explores in depth what Bourdieu names as a recurring crisis, for contemporary intellectuals, of testing “the forms of thought we apply to ourselves when we take ourselves as object of thought” (The Rules of Art, 340). For no sooner did nineteenth-century women’s culture become available for Rich as an object of sentimental identification than it provoked a crisis of identification, as the race and class fissures of twentieth-century U.S. feminism, and of Rich’s own personal life and poetic career, mirrored and replicated those of the nineteenth century. This crisis of identification and vocation has continued to trouble—and regenerate—Rich’s poetics ever since. True to its historical moment, Rich’s Dream of a Common Language, comprising poems from 1974 to 1977, is generally organized around what Elaine Showalter would call the themes of “feminist critique.” According to this critique, patriarchal culture has silenced and buried women’s voices under a weight of repression and stereotyping, and women’s experience—especially, for Rich in this volume, the experience of lesbian eroticism—is what transpires in the “wild zone,” in Showalter’s terminology, outside patriarchal narratives. Under the terms of feminist critique, as would become clearer for feminist criticism in retrospect, nineteenth-century women’s cultures of sentiment were para-

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doxically both impossible and compulsory to constitute as objects of historical knowledge: compulsory, because women’s cultures of sentiment answered to the felt need to put some realizable historical content into the methodologically cleared space of the “wild zone”; impossible, because the very notion of the “wild zone” was predicated on women’s being driven out of the spaces of written history. The “Twenty-one Love Poems” at the center of The Dream of a Common Language, narrating Rich’s love affair with an unidentified woman, particularly thematize this reading of women’s history as the unwritten. The archetypal New York intellectual “apartment full of books,” with which poem V in the sequence begins, is inevitably, as it seems, an apartment full of male-authored books: Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types; yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind, Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide, and the ghosts—their hands clasped for centuries— of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake, centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves; and we still have to stare into the absence of men who would not, women who could not, speak to our life—this still unexcavated hole called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.8 The poem ends upon an oxymoronic metaphor, civilization as a “still unexcavated hole”: In what sense is a “still unexcavated hole” a hole? Is a hole a hole before it is dug? Rich’s metaphor distills the ambiguously emergent status of women’s culture as an object of knowledge in the mid-1970s: it is a vacancy that must be imagined into existence as a vacancy (a hole not yet excavated) before the recovery of the stillunknown artifacts it may contain can proceed.9 More versions of women’s culture as the unwritten follow in the “Twenty-one Love Poems.” Fleeing the hole called civilization, the lovers in the sequence find themselves out in a country that has no language no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren through gorges unexplored since dawn whatever we do together is pure invention the maps they gave us were out of date by years . . . (poem XIII)

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What lies on the other side of this desert is figured as song rather than book: the music on the radio comes clear— neither Rosenkavalier nor Gotterd ¨ ammerung ¨ but a woman’s voice singing old songs with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute plucked and fingered by women outside the law. Where the “books unwritten” of poem V could only be imagined, not seen or read, behind the shelves full of Goethe and Gide, this poem’s song, suggestive of oral tradition and transmission rather than the written word, for a time at least displaces the high operatic texts of heterosexual romance. The two lovers of the sequence, however, do not manage to remain together, as a couple, in this place “outside the law.” Strikingly, Rich represents her dawning sense of their separation, in poem XVIII of the sequence, as the unwilled intrusion into her consciousness of a nineteenth-century male writer’s words: You’re telling the story of your life for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words. The story of our lives becomes our lives. Now you’re in fugue across what some I’m sure Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea. Those are the words that come to mind. I feel estrangement, yes. As I’ve felt dawn pushing toward daybreak. The repressed returns not as an avenging matriarch out of women’s unwritten prehistory but in the words of the eminently Victorian Matthew Arnold (whose ghost will shortly return again to Rich’s poetry). Arnold’s intrusion makes a daunting comment on the “unexcavated hole”—women’s unwritten books—that the earlier poem in the sequence willed into being behind Blake and Swift and Gide, as if to say that behind all the books lie . . . more books; perhaps even the lesbian erotic unconscious can never be unwritten enough. What women finally aspire to have in the “Twenty-one Love Poems” is not a written history but a prehistory, the mythic Stonehenge in which Rich envisions herself circling at the end of the sequence—provided that circle can be kept empty of the male-authored words that rush in to colonize it, which Arnold’s ghost suggests is a difficult hope to realize. The poems surrounding the “Twenty-one Love Poems” in The Dream of a Common Language, although they programmatically expand the “wild zone” of women’s culture beyond the boundary of the lesbian

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couple, similarly suspend themselves over civilization’s “unexcavated hole,” making space for a history of women’s culture even while declaring that space, in certain ways, unfillable (or—the same thing—always already filled with the wrong things). “Phantasia for Elvira Shateyev,” for example—written for the leader of an all-women’s climbing expedition that was lost on Lenin Peak in 1974—presents itself as the dramatic monologue of the dead woman, including excerpts from the diary “torn from her fingers” by the storm: here again Rich’s central mid-1970s metaphor for women’s culture, as object of knowledge and object of identification, is unwritten or unreadable writing. Similarly, Rich’s poem “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” takes the form of an imaginary letter from the painter Paula Becker to her friend, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, written after Becker’s marriage to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and on the eve of Becker’s death in 1907 from complications of childbirth. “Do you know,” Rich has Becker write, I was dreaming I had died giving birth to the child. I couldn’t paint or speak or even move. My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem— a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend. I was your friend but in the dream you didn’t say a word. The method of this poem could be called digging a hole while filling it in the same gesture: Rich excavates the space too beautifully occupied by Rilke’s requiem for his wife by producing the unwritten but corrective women’s writing that could have taken its place there. Along with other poems in The Dream of a Common Language, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” strikingly overlooks nineteenth-century women’s culture as a location to excavate; when Rich refers to named women in this volume, they are women of twentieth-century modernity. Nineteenth-century women’s cultures of sentiment do not yet figure explicitly as objects of literary-historical knowledge in Rich’s poetry in The Dream of a Common Language, but the method of this poem could nevertheless be called sentimental: by an act of sympathetic identification, its author produces words for a woman who lacks them not only by virtue of her death but because her body, in pregnancy and childbirth as well as death, so conspicuously speaks for her. Sentimentalism’s potential and difficulty as a political epistemology for the subject of feminist knowledge are certainly impinging on Rich’s poetics by this time—and nowhere more clearly than in “Power,” the very first poem of The Dream of a Common Language.

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From its title forward, “Power” instructs its readers to think the relationship between power and knowledge, and to do so through a double allegory of feminist critical recovery projects. Like “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff,” “Power” makes knowledge by simultaneously digging and refilling a hole. Knowledge is power is health, says the poem’s first, idealized, act of uncovering: Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate Drink me, says women’s history imagined in this mode—“drink and be whole again beyond confusion,” as Robert Frost famously advised with respect to a similar excavation at the end of “Directive.” Wordless, the bottle offers itself up to an imagined oral consumption (imagined, since surely the bottle must be empty) beyond or before articulate speech. Against this mode of imagining women’s history as a “perfect” recovery exactly answering to present needs, however, Rich juxtaposes another version of the relationship between knowledge and power: Today I was reading about Marie Curie: she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness her body bombarded for years by the element she had purified It seems she denied to the end the source of the cataracts on her eyes the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil To borrow Shirley Samuels’s influential characterization of nineteenthcentury American sentimental writing, “the texts examined here expose bodies,” suffering bodies.10 More than that: Rich exposes Marie Curie as suffering from the effects of exposure to radiation, under other circumstances a curative technology exactly by virtue of its power to expose hidden damages to examination and intervention. The nightmare obverse of the beautiful amber bottle that says without words “drink me and be whole again,” the written biography of Marie Curie precipitates Rich’s poem into a suffering circle of knowledge, in which the means of knowledge damage its object and, perhaps, its subject as well. Rich comes to know Curie, like herself a famous and wounded woman, by means of print-mediated identification with suffering—the basic technology of nineteenth-century sentimentalism. To know Curie through identification, however, is also for Rich to identify with Curie’s unknowing, even at the most fundamental level of access to the other,

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her suffering: What would it mean to identify with the suffering of someone so thoroughly alienated from her own pain—“She must have known she suffered”—and who was unwilling to identify the agent of her suffering with her own intellectual project of knowing? For both Marie Curie and Adrienne Rich reading her life in this poem, the dictum that “knowledge is power” cuts two ways. Unlike the usual suffering objects of the nineteenth-century sentimental gaze, Marie Curie is famous under her own name, a socially consecrated producer of knowledge as well as its object. In displaying Curie’s wounds, Rich is not making visible a previously invisible social being, as sentimentalism sometimes sought to do, or claiming subjectivity on behalf of someone heretofore categorically denied it.11 She is, rather, exposing what Curie’s own self-constitution as a subject of knowledge demanded that she keep hidden: the embodiment of the knower, the body’s vulnerability to what it makes contact with, the revenge of the known upon the knower. Is this poem’s rhetorical use of the wounds of the other sentimental? Its methods resemble those of nineteenth-century sentimentalisms, but that characterization might better fit the first verse paragraph of the poem and its image of history as a cure effected by the innocently wordless object. Indeed, I would propose this verse paragraph as an epitome of modernist sentimentalism—craft objects, as stand-ins for the expressive human body, doing for the twentieth century the work that suffering mothers and children archetypally did for the nineteenth century.12 True, “Power” implicitly polarizes two ways of knowing, Curie’s objectivist denial of the embodied knower against the speaker’s way of exposing and identifying with Curie’s bodily wounds. But Rich’s sentimental way of knowing Curie paradoxically exposes her to, or puts her in the grammatical place of, Curie’s own depersonalization—witness the impersonal antisepsis of Rich’s own language about Curie’s wounds: “It seems she denied to the end / the source of the cataracts on her eyes / the cracked and suppurating skin of her fingerends.” “Power” mercilessly implicates sentimentalism and objectivism in one another. Whatever lies in the earth deposits of women’s history, “Power” suggests, is at least as radioactive as it is curative for Rich. In Bourdieu’s words, what she finds there is a version of “the unconscious deposited in each intellectual by the very history of which intellectuals are the products” (The Rules of Art, 340), a prehistory of her own life as a feminist intellectual. The realization of her own overwriting by this history would explode upon Rich in her volume of poems after The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, published in 1981 and comprising poems written from 1978 to 1981. The Dream of a Common Language, I have suggested, all but willed

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women’s pre-twentieth-century history into the realm of preliterate myth, whether figured as the unwritten book, the unmapped, unruled landscape, or—in the curative mode—the silent, anonymous, all-healing object (the amber bottle in “Power”; the shaft of wheat in “Cartographies of Silence”; the quilt in “Transcendental Etude”). A Wild Patience, by contrast, owns nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century women’s history as a literate history. Where The Dream of a Common Language aspired to be the map of the unmapped country, A Wild Patience figures itself as a book of the archives, painfully literate, overtly didactic and didacted, footnoted and lecturing—like much of the nineteenth-century women’s writing it struggles to come to terms with. “Freedom,” Rich concludes in “For Memory,” an early poem in A Wild Patience: It isn’t once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark— freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together, inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections. The poet who imagined herself as the explorer of extinct volcanoes, trackless deserts, and “gorges unexplored since dawn” in The Dream of a Common Language resolutely turns her back on the landscapes of the sublime, including the sublime of her own previous writing (“Orion,” “Planetarium,” among Rich’s most famous star-bound poems of the 1960s and 1970s) and recommends us all to the library. The “starry worlds” to be sought henceforth, “Freedom” claims, lie not in uncharted natures but in the fragments of the already written. What makes nineteenth-century women’s written culture newly available to Rich as an object of knowledge between the end of The Dream of a Common Language and the beginning of A Wild Patience? Certainly the late-1970s acceleration of feminist recovery projects in women’s literature and history expanded Rich’s sense of the archives, but her own influential early prose essays on women writers—Anne Bradstreet in 1966, Charlotte Bront¨e’s Jane Eyre in 1973, and Emily Dickinson in 1975—only underline the obvious, that Rich had sought out pre-twentieth-century women’s literate and literary history, and sometimes engaged with its figures in her poetry, well before the moment of 1978.13 As several poems in A Wild Patience make clear, what made nineteenth-century literate women’s culture available and even compulsory for Rich as an object of poetic knowledge was not only the empirical archival labor recommended to readers in “For Memory” but also the politics of Rich’s contemporary late-1970s feminism, increas-

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ingly divided by differences of race and class between women, which forced her to confront nineteenth-century women’s literacy as both privilege and guilt and to engage openly with the historical legacy of sentimentalism as a raced and classed political technology of literacy.14 “Heroines,” for example, from its baldly generic title forward, declares its origins as a history assignment aimed at confronting the world of nineteenth-century polite women’s letters with the history outside the experience of its authors: Exceptional even deviant you draw your long skirts across the nineteenth century Your mind burns long after death not like the harbor beacon but like a pyre of driftwood on the beach You are spared illiteracy death by pneumonia teeth which leave the gums the seamstress’ clouded eyes the mill-girl’s shortening breath by a collection of circumstances soon to be known as class privilege Rich’s endnote to the poem refers readers to historian Gerda Lerner’s 1979 volume, The Majority Finds Its Past.15 This note and the many other endnotes Rich supplies for A Wild Patience do not recall the teasing, ironic footnotes of Eliot’s The Wasteland so much as the rigorously didactic footnotes of early nineteenth-century American poets of schooling like Sigourney and Lucretia Davidson. Indeed, Gerda Lerner is to A Wild Patience almost what the nineteenth-century ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was to Sigourney’s Traits of the Aborigines of America (not to mention Longfellow’s later Hiawatha): the poet’s footnote muse of historical authenticity and historical witness to suffering.16 In vocational terms, there is clearly a strongly ascetic, self-disciplining flavor to the history assignment Rich undertakes in “Heroines”: here and elsewhere in A Wild Patience, the poet conspicuously wills her submission to the “bounds” of prose history, a submission she figures as labor, a submission that turns poetry into redemptive work—a kind of

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sentimental collaboration, in Mary Louise Kete’s term, between the poet and her reader.17 A Wild Patience proposes and repeatedly performs this ascetic gesture as a kind of homeopathic cure for the historical sins of nineteenth-century literate sentimental women’s culture. By calling it a “homeopathic cure,” I mean that Rich’s cure seems bound to repeat in various ways the history it diagnoses. One mode of this repetition is quite strictly literal: in her poem “Culture and Anarchy,” for example, Rich quotes literally and extensively from a variety of nineteenth-century women’s prose writings, public and private—from the diaries of Susan B. Anthony to the letters of Elizabeth Barrett and the multivolume, public History of Woman Suffrage. And yet the poem’s title comes not from any of these nineteenth-century women writers but out of Matthew Arnold’s prose writings—he whose poetry so dishearteningly emerged from Rich’s unconscious in The Dream of a Common Language as the words of the “salt estranging sea.” Why Matthew Arnold, in this poem celebrating nineteenth-century women’s culture? Rich’s endnote to the poem scrupulously notes her theft, as she calls it there, from Arnold but does not elaborate her motives. For my own larger purposes in thinking about American women’s poetry, Arnold is of course an enormously significant figure in the nineteenth-century institutionalization of the vernacular Anglo-American literary canon, and his dual historical identity as both professor of poetry at Oxford and inspector in the British schools illustrates how that institutionalization operated differently at different levels of the school system. I suspect that some of these associations are pertinent for Rich’s poem as well. Rich confronts Arnold in “Culture and Anarchy” as a kind of ghost at the feast of women’s culture, the ghost of nineteenthcentury liberal culture-hope. (It was exactly this hope that Arnold represented to his good American friend and reader, Annie Fields.)18 If nineteenth-century women frequently imagined the culture of sentiment as the basis of cross-class and cross-race alliances, so too did Matthew Arnold hopefully imagine culture as the foundation for a cross-class national liberal sensibility. The alternative to such acculturation, in Arnold’s mind, was working-class anarchy. Rich’s poem, by linking nineteenth-century women’s writings to the lush “Anarchy of August,” implies that Arnold might have done well to worry about women’s potential for anarchy, too. And yet Arnold’s problem belongs to Rich and to nineteenth-century women’s political cultures of sentiment as well: depending on one’s social vantage point, the cross-class, cross-race alliances of women’s sentimental culture may be indistinguishable from culture as agency of social control. In recent years, of course, this problem has settled in at the core of feminist cultural historians’ efforts to grapple with nineteenth-century

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cultures of sentiment.19 Rich wrote “Culture and Anarchy” in 1978, well ahead of most of this scholarly debate. What interests me about the poem is not only how its content incorporates and anticipates so much feminist scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s but how it registers its intellectual and political difficulties formally—by incorporating, in italics, the prose writings of nineteenth-century women. Here again the ghost of Arnold seems to haunt Rich’s sense of her own career. Not only did Arnold at midcareer give up writing poetry for the sake of prose; he also exercised something like Rich’s own retrospective self-scrutiny in looking back over his work. The preface to his first collected Poems famously turns upon his own early “Empedocles on Etna,” which he omitted from the volume for representing (sentimentally) situations of manly pathos “painful, not tragic . . . in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.”20 In her “Culture and Anarchy,” by contrast, Rich is plainly concerned to make poetry do something—but what poetry does in this poem is quote prose. I suspect that Rich’s ascetic subordination of poetry to prose in A Wild Patience is a formal method for repeating the mechanisms of sentimental reading and writing while divorcing them from passive aesthetic pleasure and orienting them instead toward productive labor. Where nineteenth-century women’s sentimental literary politics put the body of the other, especially the slave woman, on display in token of all women’s suffering, Rich’s late twentieth-century feminism puts nineteenth-century literate white women on display not in their bodies but in their writing—writing that takes on a certain formal embodiment or foregrounding, however, not only when Rich lineates their prose as poetry but when she contemplates their books as material objects: The heavy volumes, calf, with titles in smooth leather, red and black, gilt letters spelling: the history of human suffering I brush my hand across my eyes —this is a dream, I think—and read: the history of woman suffrage Emblems of privilege as Rich so clearly makes them, the books lead Rich directly back to suffering bodies and their imagined cure by women’s culture: the history of human suffering like bound back issues of a periodical stretching for miles of human suffering: borne, tended, soothed, cauterized,

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stanched, cleansed, absorbed, endured by women It is a familiar sentimental sequence: books, wounds, tears (Rich brushes her hand across her eyes to read better). But Rich wants this sequence to end in labor almost before the tears can be registered, certainly before pleasure can be taken in suffering. Generic “women” labor on behalf of the suffering here; elsewhere in the poem, women labor collaboratively, in the present, over their writing; at still other moments in the poem, labor and pleasure combine in the domesticity of women cooking, reading, tending house, and writing together in a much-loved home. Rich thus imagines the scene of her own reading and rewriting of nineteenth-century women’s culture as a twentieth-century re-creation of sentimental culture’s idealized domestic scenes of reading and writing, but one informed in hindsight by the contemporary feminist critique of the exclusions and inequalities of the nineteenth century’s own idealizations. The space of this house and its books, both professionally intellectual and domestic, pleasured and labored, incorporating nineteenth- and twentieth-century modes of women’s writerly and political lives, embodies for Rich’s poem a form of recursive historical thought, framing the still not fully realized social possibilities of nineteenth-century American women’s writing at the end of the twentieth century. Adrienne Rich is not alone in recovering aspects of nineteenth-century American literary cultures for present-day purposes. I began this book by observing that nineteenth-century American poetry has not yet become the object of much sustained critical attention, at least not in proportion to the rate at which it has recently been anthologized. A glance at poetry’s current place in American political culture suggests, however, that nineteenth-century American poetry is being repeated in certain ways, even in the absence of extended critical interpretation—repeated in growing nostalgia for its social relations, its practices of transmission, its culture in the full senses of the word. Nineteenth-century pedagogies of recitation and memorization are making a return: Robert Pinsky, in his recently completed term as the nation’s poet laureate, devoted much genial energy to the project of videotaping Americans from all walks of life reciting their favorite poems (including nineteenth-century staples like Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life”), while John Hollander followed his Library of America anthology of nineteenth-century American poetry not with critical work on that body of poetry but with another anthology of poems explicitly intended for memorization.21 A January 23, 2000, front-page story in the Boston Sunday Globe, headlined “The Competition,” celebrated “Prize Speaking Night” at the public school

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in Danbury, New Hampsire, with its ranks of well-scrubbed children lining up to recite poems they “chose . . . weeks ago and have been reciting before going to bed ever since.” As the Globe writer observes, the Danbury competition keeps alive “a tradition that harks back to a time, many decades ago, when country people across New England gathered to play fiddles, sing songs, and hold debates and speaking competitions.” In the words of poet Donald Hall, printed in boldface above the story’s accompanying photograph of Danbury’s children fidgeting in their seats under the school gym’s basketball hoop, “Prize Speaking Night at Danbury School is a measure of what we were. A memory alive reconstituting the old world.”22 Yet the uses of memory always bear looking into. The context of the Globe’s nostalgic poetry story, never acknowledged in the story itself but clearly implicit in its juxtaposition with the front-page headline story, was the opening of the presidential campaign season in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.23 The survival of poetry in Danbury, New Hampshire, where children “never really lost the magic of the spoken word” and competitive oratory remains a civic occasion that can generate a hundred spectators out of a town of 985 on a winter’s night, images for the Globe an ideal of participatory local democracy that the actual primaries and caucuses of the national political campaign will inevitably reflect in more tarnished forms. The troubling aspect of this poetic-civic ideal, however, lies in its power to displace more polyglot imaginations of local democracy. The obverse of Danbury, New Hampshire, is Boston, Massachusetts, where not even the baseball stadium, the Globe writer observes, could hold the portion of the population that convenes in Danbury for Prize Speaking Night.24 The Globe’s impossible image of Boston’s citizens gathered en masse to hear poetry recited at Fenway Park underlines how mass modernity renders impossible by virtue of sheer numbers a common civic oral culture (like the one Annie Fields tried to invoke in her “Ode” to Boston’s great organ); but it also invokes the specter of speech diversity as the index of unmanageable class and race hierarchy. “Danbury has avoided the effects of gentrification,” observes the Globe, suggesting that Prize Speaking Night can function as an ideal image of participatory democracy only in the absence of class strife and in the minimum of racial diversity—all the children pictured sitting “front and center” at the competition are white. Where the discipline of elocution, at the end of the nineteenth century, sought in its programs of oral recitation to manage and professionalize American diversity, the Globe’s nostalgic story implies that at the end of the twentieth century, poetry’s powers of normalizing speech both require and help reproduce a uniform community. The Globe’s idealized scene of instruction has deep historical roots in

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nineteenth-century American cultures of poetry. Lydia Sigourney would have recognized at once that the Globe’s Danbury fulfills the social program of her own poem “The Village,” and by Sigourney’s own pedagogical methods. Read more fully and in its historical contexts, however, the work of nineteenth-century American women poets, like Adrienne Rich’s recovery of nineteenth-century women’s culture, challenges its own idealizations: Sigourney’s writings elsewhere acknowledge the historical violence by which “The Village” came to be planted, and Frances Harper’s poetry directly confronts who and what goes missing when Danbury’s schoolhouse recitations come to stand wishfully for American democracy and American letters as a whole. In the spirit of Rich’s reading of her nineteenth-century precursors, my own aim in recovering nineteenth-century American women’s poetry for scholarly interpretation has been not to repeat this scene of instruction literally but rather to understand its exclusions along with its power.

Notes

Introduction. The Objects of Recovery 1. John Hollander, ed., American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1993); Cheryl Walker, ed., American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Joan R. Sherman, ed., African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Janet Gray, ed., She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997); Paula Bernat Bennett, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 2. Emily Watts’s early formalist survey, The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), included some popular nineteenth-century women poets. Cheryl Walker’s The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), stood alone as a scholarly book dedicated specifically to nineteenth-century American women’s poetry until Elizabeth A. Petrino’s Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820–1885 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998). As I write, however, major new studies are forthcoming, including Paula Bernat Bennett’s Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), and Eliza Richards’s Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2004). 3. Joseph Harrington, “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature,” American Literary History 8 (fall 1996): 496–515. Harrington cites Dana Nelson’s The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature (1992) as one example of many of influential work in new American literary studies that does not look to poetry as American literature. For recent studies on general topics in American literature that do include poetry, see, for example, Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), which moves between the novel and poetry by Sigourney, Longfellow, and unpublished writers; Carolyn Sorisio, Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), which treats Frances Harper’s poetry; and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). Sharon Harris’s review essay “ ‘A New Era in Female History’: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers,” American Literature 74 (2002): 603–18, demonstrates how true Harrington’s observation remains in the field of women’s writing partic-

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ularly. As Harris accurately notes, “Recovery of nineteenth-century U.S. women’s writing began primarily with novels, then we looked to autobiographies, travel narratives, women’s suffrage texts, and so on” (605). The end of the essay confirms poetry’s place in the “and so on,” gesturing toward “poetry, for instance” (617), as a site of important current work. The work in poetry specifically cited as important by Harris, however, Paula Bennett’s NineteenthCentury Women Poets and Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, ed. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (Ashfield, Mass.: Paris, 1998), remains stubbornly locked in the category of anthologies or editions. 4. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, ´ Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 12. 5. Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990), 284. 6. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 7. Writing of critical work on Frances Harper and other pre-twentieth-century African American writers, Frances Smith Foster complains of “[t]he notable reluctance of many scholars to offer close readings of texts or to assess the literary aesthetics that these early writings manifest.” Foster’s own work attends to both the social conditions of African American women’s writing and the literary intricacies of particular works, and calls for recovery of the “literary aesthetics” of pre-twentieth-century African American literature. “Gender, Genre, and Vulgar Secularism: The Case of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the AME Press,” in Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Women’s Literature, ed. Dolan Hubbard (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 51, 54. Foster’s critique implicitly takes issue with Paul Lauter’s influential brief against close formalist reading, especially as applied to working-class art; canon revision on Lauter’s model would proceed directly from anthologizing to a form of teaching, not yet fully articulated, that would dispense with the medium of close explication. “Caste, Class, and Canon,” reprinted in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Robyn R. Warhold and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 129–50. 8. Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by AfricanAmerican Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 140. 9. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, The War of the Words (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988); Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 10. Mary Poovey, “Recovering Ellen Pickering,” Yale Journal of Criticism 13 (2002): 438. See also the eloquent responses in the same number by Margaret Homans (453–60) and Jill Campbell (461–65), followed by Poovey’s rejoinder (467–78).

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11. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Conquest of Autonomy,” in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 70–71. 12. Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of American from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 12. 13. In addition to Crain, see recent work represented, for example, by the essays collected in Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, ed. Catherine Hobbs (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Katherine H. Adams, A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880–1940 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); and Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of AfricanAmerican Literary Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 14. On the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century history of this development, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. chapter 2, “Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon” (85– 133). 15. Nancy Armstrong, “Literature as Women’s History,” Genre 19 (winter 1986): 367.

Chapter One. Who Killed Lucretia Davidson? 1. Walker, Nightingale’s Burden, 80. 2. In 1871, M. Oliver Davidson made the last nineteenth-century attempt to trade on the family name, reissuing Lucretia Maria Davidson’s poems (and finally dropping the antebellum convention of designating them “remains”) in an illustrated edition, prefaced with his own biography and a few of his poems; see Poems by Lucretia Maria Davidson, ed. M. Oliver Davidson (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871). 3. C. M. Sedgwick, “Preface,” Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Margaret M. Davidson, the Mother of Lucretia Maria and Margaret M. Davidson (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1843), n.p. Mrs. Davidson’s writings never received the acclaim of her daughters’ poetry. 4. Edgar Allan Poe, “Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 10: 221–26, and “Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson,” 174–78. 5. Joan Dayan argues that “convertibility”—“the unbelievable overturning of the law of identity and contradiction,” rendered fictionally as tales of “possession, multiple hauntings, and identity dissolutions”—is the key to Poe’s critique of “the white epistemologist of the sublime, the enlightenment ‘universal man.’ ” See “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature 66 (June 1994): 244; see also Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 200–203. For a complementary reading of Poe and the ladies that reads Poe’s identification with

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women poets in terms of the literary marketplace rather than epistemological vertigo, see Eliza Richards, “ ‘The Poetess’ and Poe’s Performance of the Feminine,” Arizona Quarterly 55, no. 2 (summer 1999): 1–29. 6. Poe, “Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson,” 10:222. 7. See Dayan, “Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” 260–62, on the operation of this racial vocabulary of womanhood in “Ligeia.” 8. Miss [Catherine] Sedgwick, “Biography of Lucretia Maria Davidson,” in Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson, Collected and Arranged by Her Mother (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1847); Washington Irving, “Biography of Miss Margaret Davidson,” in Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1841), 11. All citations of the Davidson sisters’ poetry are from these editions. 9. Dayan, “Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” 259. 10. Richard Brodhead, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” in Cultures of Letters, 13–47. Brodhead reads Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter as “an attempt to weigh the methods and powers of a newer against an older disciplinary order,” and adds, “Taking the measure of this new order might be said to be the task of Edgar Allan Poe’s altogether weirder gothic as well” (29). 11. Ibid., 47. 12. Fiction dominates in most literary-cultural studies of mid-nineteenth-century American culture in addition to Brodhead’s, from Ann Douglas’s early Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), to the more recent Culture of Sentiment: Race Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Of the fifteen essays in Culture of Sentiment, none uses poetry as its primary body of evidence or focuses on the cultural location and work of poetry specifically as a genre. Fiction’s dominance holds across divergent critical perspectives: Judith Fetterley, for instance, criticizes Douglas’s, Brodhead’s, and Samuels’s books for purveying too “disproportionately negative” an assessment of women’s “sentimentalism,” but she, like them, focuses almost exclusively (if not self-consciously) on fiction. Judith Fetterley, “Commentary: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Politics of Recovery,” American Literary History 6 (fall 1994): 607. There is, of course, a long critical history of linking the rise of the novel to the rise of the middle class in Anglo-American culture, from Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957) to Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), to take only two conspicuous points in this critical lineage. No such well-elaborated critical consensus about poetry’s historical role in the formation of the middle class yet exists, although John Guillory’s chapter on Gray’s “Elegy” as an exemplary instance of the formation in the English middle-class vernacular of a kind of cultural capital previously restricted to classical tongues comes close; see Guillory, Cultural Capital, chap. 2, “Mute Inglorious Miltons: Gray, Wordsworth, and the Vernacular Canon,” 85–133, and chap. 2 of this book. 13. This way of framing the opposition comes from Nina Baym’s discussion

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of Emma Willard’s refiguration of republican motherhood. “Women and the Republic: Emma Willard’s Rhetoric of History,” American Quarterly 43 (March 1991): 2. 14. Carlin T. Kindilien, entry on Lucretia Maria Davidson and Margaret Miller Davidson, in Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971), 437. 15. Walker, American Women Poets, 94. Walker notes and values “humor” and “a bloodthirsty” side in her Davidson as signs of rebellion against the “poetess” stereotype. 16. Fetterley, “Commentary,” 602, 605. Interpretive “strategies of close reading and thematic study,” Fetterley suggests, may have fallen out of professional favor at just the time they were required for the reading of newly “recovered” women writers (605), which may be a problem of particular relevance for poetry. 17. The relative weakness of reading strategies adequate to poetry, even in the most sympathetic of feminist intellectual contexts, is underlined by poetry’s share, or lack of it, in the first decade (1984–94) of Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Legacy has featured—aside from articles, indeed an entire special issue, on Emily Dickinson—relatively little critical work on poetry. Poets appear most often under the aegis of “profiles,” biographical sketches of the life and work, a critical genre borrowed directly from nineteenth-century periodicals aimed at women readers. Annie Finch’s review in Legacy (vol. 11, no. 1, 1994) of Walker’s 1992 American Women Poets hails the anthology as “an unprecedented effort to remedy the erasure of a century of women’s poetry,” but it concludes with lamentation that “a century of unnecessary shame over . . . ‘sentimental verses’ ” has not yet come to an end; “this first step entails many more, before we can even begin to understand the connections between these poets and ourselves without prejudice or shame” (88). That our deliverance from this shame seems always to be proleptic, that Finch should be looking to a “first step” after a decade of Legacy’s publication (which has included some of Finch’s own work on nineteenth-century women poets), supports all too well Fetterley’s point that interpretive strategies have lagged behind recovery efforts in nineteenth-century women’s writing. Nina Baym’s work on Lydia Sigourney as a writer not only of domestic lyric but also of ambitious historical poems issues productive challenges to some of the assumptions shaping critical understanding of nineteenth-century women’s poetry; see Baym, “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” American Literature 62 (September 1990): 385–404. Joanne Dobson’s “Sex, Wit, and Sentiment: Frances Osgood and the Poetry of Love,” American Literature 65 (December 1993): 631–50, explores Osgood’s provocative critique of conventions of sentimental love and examines how important contemporary reception was in constituting Osgood as a “sentimental” poet. The fundamental strategy of Dobson’s essay, however, is to split off the “sentimental poetess” from “Fanny Osgood, a New York City sophisticate” and wit (631–32), invert Osgood’s own valuation of her “ ‘angelic,’ or sentimental mode” over her “satirical, witty salon poems,” and recover the latter as the true “ ‘wild card’ of nineteenth-century American poetry” (646). This

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strategy seems to me to repeat some of the problems endemic to readings of the Davidson sisters. 18. Irving, “Biography,” 19–20. 19. As Patricia Crain observes of a similar scene in The Wide, Wide World, “In a supplement to, and replacement for, biological reproduction, the mother is meant to be stamped into and onto the child,” in the work of what Crain calls “maternal alphabetization.” Story of A, 149. 20. Poe, “Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson,” 10: 224. 21. Unsigned review (Robert Southey) of Amir Kahn, and Other Poems . . . With a Biographical Sketch, by Samuel F. B. Morse, [London] Quarterly Review 41, no. 82 (1829; published in the United States in 1830): 293, 296. 22. Ibid., 301. 23. “Her application to her studies at school was intense. Her mother judiciously, but in vain, attempted a diversion in favour of that legitimate sedative to female genius, the needle; Lucretia performed her prescribed tasks with fidelity, and with amazing celerity, and was again buried in her book” (Sedgwick, “Biography,” 29). On this important and anxious topic, Sedgwick reproduces a letter from Mrs. Davidson about Lucretia’s services during a convalesence of her mother’s: “She did not so much yield to her ruling passion as to look into a book, or take up a pen (says her mother), lest she should again become so absorbed in them as to neglect to perform those little offices which a feeble, affectionate mother had a right to claim at her hands” (44). When her mother observes Lucretia pining for want of any reading or writing, “the generous mother succeeded in convincing her child that she had been misguided in the course she had adopted, that the strongest wish of her heart was to advance her in her literary career, and for this she would make every exertion in her power; at the same time she very judiciously advised her to intersperse her literary pursuits with those domestic occupations so essential to prepare every woman in our land for a housewife, her probable destiny” (44–45). 24. Ibid., 58. 25. Ibid., 57–58. Sedgwick writes without benefit of Darwinian thought and later nineteenth-century eugenics, which makes the coincidence between her views and those of later prophets of educated white women’s contribution to “race suicide” all the more striking. 26. See Baym, “Women and the Republic,” 7–8. 27. “There were two public examinations during the year, one in February at the close of the first term and the annual examination which began the latter part of July and lasted for eight days. The annual examination drew crowds of spectators—parents, friends, and prominent educators, legislators, and clergymen, who were invited by Mrs. Willard. It was one of the great social events of the year for Troy and Albany. . . . The girls were questioned one by one, standing at the table as they recited, and usually two stood there together as this made it less embarrassing. Some of the best compositions were read, but never by the authors themselves, as this would have been too great a strain on the modesty of young ladies. As a blushing young girl rose to read the composition of a friend, she was supported throughout the ordeal by another girl, close beside her. Everything was done to preserve modesty and to keep girls from

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becoming too forward or bold.” Alma Lutz, Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 183–84. 28. Sedgwick, “Biography,” 58–59, 62. 29. Cheryl Walker, answering from a twentieth-century feminist perspective the question of who killed Lucretia Davidson, speculates on the possibility that Moss Kent, a “family friend,” may in fact have been Lucretia Davidson’s father and that he may knowingly have dispatched her off to the rigors of boarding school, not only to the Troy Seminary but afterward to a Miss Gilbert’s school, when her health was clearly precarious. Although this reading of the scanty biographical evidence is provocative, I disagree with Walker’s contention that Mrs. Davidson was in general a “weaker figure” than Davidson’s fathers, natural and surrogate (Nightingale’s Burden, 72–73). Mrs. Davidson was herself persistent and forward in arranging her daughters’ and eventually her own literary debuts and seeing to the maintenance of their reputations. Male “family friends” come and go in both daughters’ biographies (Margaret has an “English gentleman” friend who plays in her life something of Moss Kent’s role in Lucretia’s), but the mother’s loving discipline and ambitions are constant. It is she who fosters and oversees her daughters’ relationships (living and dead) with their various male impresarios. 30. On the role of some of Sedgwick’s other writings in the emergence of disciplinary intimacy, see Brodhead, “Sparing the Rod,” 22, 29. 31. Irving, “Biography,” 13–14. 32. Walker, American Women Poets, 93. 33. Cheryl Walker surveys feminist approaches to the question of the author, from a perspective informed by her reading of women poets typically received as “sentimental” or “masked,” in her essay “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author,” Critical Inquiry 16 (spring 1990): 551–71. The particular projections and demands brought to nineteenth-century women, especially white middleclass women, by twentieth-century feminisms have been the subject of much concern lately; see Fetterley’s “Commentary” and, for another perspective, Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s ´ eloquent reflections on her own project in Touching Liberty, esp. 13. 34. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem Is Being Written,” in Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 186, 187. The essay was first published in Representations 17 (winter 1987): 110–43. 35. Sedgwick, “Biography,” 27. 36. At stake in many of the Davidson household’s scenes of writing and its discovery are the material implements and props of writing. Her mother first looks into four-year-old Lucretia’s writerly activities when Lucretia comes forward to confess that she is responsible for the disappearance of “a whole quire” of writing paper; she notices Lucretia making “quantities” of little blank books; finally, when Lucretia is six, her mother finds in a linen closet “a parcel of papers, which proved to be Lucretia’s manuscript books” (Sedgwick, “Biography,” 26–27). Later, perhaps in her teens, “Lucretia had a most whimsical fancy for cutting sheets of paper into narrow strips, sewing them together and writing on both sides; and once playfully boasting to her mother of having written some yards, she produced a roll, and forbidding her mother’s approach, she measured

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off twenty yards!” (52). Lucretia Davidson’s small manuscript books prompt comparison to those Emily Dickinson began sewing together some forty years later. Her “fancy” for writing poetry on narrow, sewn strips of paper suggests a parody not only of the women’s domestic work assigned her by her mother— poetry as great ball of yarn—but of Lucretia’s own and her contemporaries’ tendency to measure poetic ambition by the yard. (Reviewers of both Lucretia’s and her sister Margaret’s posthumous works regularly ascertained the degree of their prodigy by the sheer length of their longest poems, a topos Poe would mockingly reproduce in his reviews of the Davidsons.) Notably, Lucretia reels out her production in such a way as to connect her to her mother while measuring off the distance between them. 37. Sedgwick, “Biography,” 52; Southey, review of Amir Khan, and Other Poems, 285; Poe, “Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson,” 10:225–26; Walker, American Women Poets, 94. 38. See Baym, “Women and the Republic,” esp. 5–6, on Willard’s geographies and later histories. Baym observes that when Willard turned to writing histories, her “territorial visualization of history, derived in part from her earlier work as a geographer, had much to do with the way that she managed to identify the nation with its political occupation of space” (6). 39. Sedgwick’s biographical account of the composition of “Amir Khan” seems (consciously or otherwise) to have drawn for its portrait of Lucretia Davidson as poet on “Kubla Khan”: “When composing her long, and complicated poems, like ‘Amir Khan,’ she required entire seclusion; if her pieces were seen in the process of production, the spell was dissolved, she could not finish them” (“Biography,” 35). Young women romantics, like Coleridge, are vulnerable to the intrusive visitor from Porlock. Notably, however, this paean to poetical solitude is directly followed by a glimpse of what Davidson looked like in “entire seclusion,” when no one should have been able to see her. The details are supplied to Sedgwick by Davidson’s mother—“We quote,” says Sedgwick, “her mother’s graphic description”—ringlets disordered in “rich profusion,” lips “half unclosed,” and so forth (35). Again, poetry’s pleasures (and their bodily signs) are what is most public as well as most private, and the mother is the privileged mediator of the discipline that ensures both privacy and publicity. 40. Emma Willard’s “Prophetic Strains,” written for her pupils in 1830 and published in her Poems (New York: White, Gallaher, and White, 1831), framed its hierarchy of civilizations, conventionally, according to what she saw as women’s place in them. If women are even today inadequately educated for liberty “in earth’s favour’d climes,” still less could one seek in barbarous lands for man’s companion— Companion! no! ah, no! man’s property! See where she bears his game, a human beast Of burden. Look again—a living doll, Trick’d out for his amusement. See, there are A hundred painted images, all for One tyrant’s sport. (13)

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Willard’s poem of universal history as female history confirms the hierarchy of civilizations presented in the textbook Universal Geography she coauthored and published in 1827 with William C. Woodbridge: “The civilization and character of a nation are intimately connected with the condition of the female sex. . . . It is common among Mohametan nations to consider them as beings without souls, made only to be the slaves of man, and the instruments of his pleasure” (223). On Islam, see especially 174–75, 188–89. 41. Willard and Woodbridge, Universal Geography, 188. 42. Comus, stage notes to line 659, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 105. Another poem by Davidson, “Sabrina,” dating almost certainly from her time at the Troy Seminary, not only draws again on Comus but repeats the distinctive overlay of schoolgirl Milton with schoolgirl geography in “Amir Khan”: Sabrina is both the name of the nymph in Comus who rises out of the Severn to free the Lady and then sinks back beneath the water, and—as Davidson would have learned from her Troy Seminary geography lessons—the name given to a volcano that in 1811 “burst out in the sea, near . . . one of the Azores, and formed an island of considerable height . . . which was named Sabrina. It has since disappeared” (Willard and Woodbridge, Universal Geography, 46). “Sabrina” flirts with the Miltonic allusion perpetrated by the original namers of the volcano (who were apparently struck by its rapid rise from and fall back under the waves) by addressing the volcano in overtly satanic terms, as “Thou spark from the fallen one’s wide flaming wing.” The poem’s narrator silences, represses, and unnames the volcano, ordering “the “dark, nameless thing” back under the waves in the poem’s conclusion. In its crossing of intellectual vocabularies, literary and scientific, in what seems to be its identification both with the volcano and with the voice that represses it, “Sabrina” exhibits the schoolgirl’s prodigious demand for recognition (see what I can do with my lessons!), as well as her aggressive ambivalence about this demand and the authority to which it submits her. To quote Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick again, “Sabrina” offers “the thrilling image of gut- or groin-level resistance or impedance” within “the assumed framework of . . . an almost absolutely ruly and obedient child.” Indeed, the most controversial framework of obedience at the Troy Seminary, the public examination structure of rising, speaking, and retiring, may lie somewhere behind the motivation of “Sabrina,” as it does behind a more lighthearted poem about the examination and its attendant anxiety (not chosen by her mother or subsequent editors for publication) that was still circulating among the seminary students years after Davidson’s death (see Lutz, Emma Willard, 184). Suggestively, the schoolmistress poet Lydia Sigourney also took her turn at a “Sabrina” poem, inspired by another geographer’s account of the island’s rise and fall. Like Davidson, but in a comic rather than Miltonic mode, Sigourney tells the island’s tale as that of an overambitious young nymph; see “Sabrina,” in Sigourney’s Poems: By the Author of “Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse” (Boston: S. G. Goodrich, 1827), 169–70. 43. As a masque enacted by aristocratic Protestant children, at their home, for their parents sitting in the audience (in a domesticating departure from the setting of Stuart court masques), Comus is a provocative text generically with

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respect to the emergence of domestic tutelary intimacy. The Lady’s intact interior will is the product of education and nature, as well as heavenly protection, witnessed to by the offstage parents who are reunited with their daughter at the masque’s conclusion—a structure of discipline that in certain ways anticipates Mrs. Davidson waiting for her daughter Margaret to emerge from her room with the evidence of her contrition. Although Paradise Lost has inevitably been the text of most feminist inquiry into Milton’s impact on women readers and writers, Comus may also have been an important and, to this point, relatively overlooked ur-text of emergent bourgeois daughterhood. Mary Shelley, for instance, read Comus more than once and referred to it in her novel of female miseducation, Mathilda, which she completed in 1822 (it was not published until 1929), two or three years before Davidson’s “Amir Khan.” 44. Again, other of Davidson’s poems explore similar relations between spontaneity and discipline in other poetic registers. The opening lines of Davidson’s humorous poem “Auction Extraordinary,” for instance, about an imagined upside-down scene of courtship in which it would be men who were compelled by financial necessity (a state-imposed tax) to marry, associate rhyme and meter with (what we might now call) compulsory heterosexuality: I dreamed a dream in the midst of my slumbers, And as fast as I dreamed it, it came into numbers; My thoughts ran along in such beautiful meter, I’m sure I n’er saw any poetry sweeter. In the end, the “old maids” of the town bid for the bachelors, sling them over their shoulders, and take them home. Like Emily Dickinson’s earliest known poem (the 1852 valentine beginning “Oh the Earth was made for lovers, for damsel, and hopeless swain”), this poem ironically links its jingling rhyme and singsong meter to courtship’s formalization of emotion, its crossings of spontaneous and compulsory emotions, free and determined language. 45. The classic feminist work on women writers and Milton is, of course, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), especially “Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers,” 187–212. Work on Milton’s reception in American has not yet addressed itself fully to the range of women writers’ responses; see George Frank Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), and Kevin P. Van Anglen The New England Milton: Literary Reception and Cultural Authority in the Early Republic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). 46. The Troy Seminary’s original nineteenth-century library, preserved at what is now the Emma Willard School, holds a copy of The Young Lady’s Elocutionary Reader. I would like to thank librarian Barbara Wiley for her help with the seminary archives. 47. Anna U. Russell and William Russell, The Young Ladies’ Elocutionary Reader (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1845), 3, 9. 48. Ibid., 39. 49. Ibid., 57–60, 99–102.

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50. This pedagogical method of emulative identification lives on in Judith Fetterley’s description of her classroom experience with teaching nineteenth-century women writers: “In the absence of . . . ‘interpretive strategies’ and in the presence of strategies that seem essentially to alienate this material” (strategies of historical distanciation and critique), “my students struggle to articulate their own identification with these writers, their own conviction that ‘this was then and this is now,’ and their own passionate involvement with these texts” (“Commentary,” 606; first emphasis mine). Students spontaneously identify with their teacher’s identification with nineteenth-century women writers; and what is The Young Ladies’ Elocutionary Reader if not a set of instructions for students in how to articulate, quite literally, their identification with dead women writers? Indeed, our students have every reason to feel that “this was then and this is now.”

Chapter Two. The School of Lydia Sigourney 1. Mrs. L[ydia] H[untley] Sigourney, Letters to My Pupils: With Narrative and Biographical Sketches (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1851), 179. 2. “Miss Huntley’s Poems,” North American Review 1 (May 1815): 111. 3. The Writings of Nancy Maria Hyde, of Norwich, Conn. Connected with a Sketch of Her Life (Norwich, Conn., 1816). Given to recycling material, Sigourney later printed Hyde’s life as “Sketch of an Early Friend,” in Letters to My Pupils, 66–77. Anticipating the dead-prodigy conventions structuring the posthumous narratives of the Davidson sisters, Sigourney presented Hyde as “poetic temperament” characterized by “shrinking delicacy” and “marked by precocity” (69), as well as by the tuberculosis of which Hyde died. 4. Mrs. L[ydia] H[untley] Sigourney, The Girl’s Reading-book. In prose and poetry; For Schools (New York: J. Orville Taylor, 1838); Sigourney, The Boy’s Reading-book (New York: J. Orville Taylor, 1839). Sigourney’s dismissive biographer, Gordon Haight, records that “by a skillful insistence on their unimpeachable morality,” Sigourney “got them [the reading books] adopted in such schools as the West Hoboken Institute.” Gordon S. Haight, Mrs. Sigourney: The Sweet Singer of Hartford (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1930), 39. 5. Mrs. L[ydia] H[untley] Sigourney, Lucy Howard’s Journal (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1857); Sigourney, Letters of Life (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1866), esp. chap. 9, “Educational Remembrances,” 186–238. 6. On the economic troubles of the Sigourney family and Lydia’s parents, which helped embolden Sigourney’s reentry into the literary marketplace, see Haight, Mrs. Sigourney, 33–36. The reviewer of Moral Pieces for the North American Review had praised the volume’s poetry over its prose (“Miss Huntley’s Poems,” 111) and recommended that the author “devote her mind to some more considerable undertaking” in the poetic line, such as versifying “the events that took place on our frontiers, in the course of the seventeenth, and beginning of the eighteenth century!” (12). Sigourney would heed this advice in composing Traits of the Aborigines, her “belated entry in the competition for ‘the’ American epic” (Baym, “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” 76).

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7. All of Sigourney’s critics observe her acute sensitivity to matters of literary marketing—Haight scornfully, later feminist critics respectfully—which extended to informed concern for her books’ production values, a concern thoroughly documented in Sigourney’s comments on each of her books in Letters of Life, chap. 13, “Literature.” The Illustrated Poems (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848) was, she writes, “the first of [my books] that in all respects of paper, typography, and binding, was quite accordant with my taste. Its sale at five dollars per copy, and seven dollars in turkey morocco, was also satisfactory to those who had so freely expended upon its execution” (Letters of Life, 355). 8. Annie Finch, “The Sentimental Poetess in the World: Metaphor and Subjectivity in Lydia Sigourney’s Nature Poetry,” Legacy 5, no. 2 (fall 1988): 3–18. Finch’s title suggests that she understands her version of Sigourney as nature poetess to be congruent with reading Sigourney as a “sentimental” poet, but she concedes—writing in advance of the deluge of 1990s work on nineteenth-century American “cultures of sentiment”—that her article’s “definition of the sentimental poetic tradition rests largely on negatives: the absence of a central poetic self and the avoidance of the unequivocal metaphorization of nature” (13). These “negative” characteristics have not figured significantly in subsequent critical work on sentimentalism; their salience in Finch’s 1988 argument derives instead from the 1980s work of Margaret Homans and other theorists concerned with delineating women poets’ departures from British romanticism. Some of the characteristics Finch observes in Sigourney’s nature poetry, however, may be better understood in the light of eighteenth-century poetics than as gendered revisions of romanticism; and other aspects of her nature poetry, especially later in her career, may be more congruent than Finch is prepared to concede with male-authored romanticism, especially with Wordsworth, whom Sigourney greatly admired and whom she met on her trip to England in 1840. For Homans on Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti’s revisions of male romantic lyric subjectivity, see Margaret Homans, “ ‘Syllables of Velvet’: Dickinson, Rossetti, and the Rhetorics of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies 11 (1985): 569– 93; on Sigourney’s meeting and correspondence with Wordsworth, see David Bonnell Green, “William Wordsworth and Lydia Huntley Sigourney,” New England Quarterly 37 (December 1964): 527–31. 9. Nina Baym, “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” was originally published in American Literature 62 (1990): 385–404; revised versions subsequently appeared in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, ed. Joyce Warren (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), and Redefining the Political Novel, ed. Sharon M. Harris (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 66–85. Citations here are taken from the essay as it appeared in Harris’s anthology. 10. Baym’s view of Sigourney as a historical writer, along with many of her contemporaries among American women writers, is more fully elaborated in her American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 81–86 and passim. 11. Baym observes (“Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” 69, 82 n. 5) that Sigourney enters Cheryl Walker’s The Nightingale’s Burden only glancingly and only as an elegist, and deduces that Walker’s “narcissistic,” as Baym terms it,

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account of women’s poetry cannot accommodate Sigourney’s public concerns in her historical writings. Jane Tompkins notes that Sigourney “epitomizes the sentimental tradition for modern critics,” but in doing so she, unlike Baym, seeks in the first instance to revalorize sentimentalism rather than dispute Sigourney’s characterization as a sentimentalist. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of America Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 160. 12. Elizabeth Petrino, “ ‘Feet So Precious Charged’: Dickinson, Sigourney, and the Child Elegy,” chap. 3 in Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries, 53– 95; portions of this chapter were first published under the same title in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 13 (fall 1994): 317–38 13. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 369–76. Karen Kilcup’s reprinting of this section of Letters of Life under the title “Requests for Writing” in her recent multigenre anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 47–50, indicates the interest and respect in which Sigourney’s authorial professionalism is held by current feminist criticism, in reaction against Haight’s condescension. 14. The Weeping Willow (Hartford, Conn.: H. S. Parsons, 1847); The Man of Uz, and Other Poems (Hartford, Conn.: Williams, Wiley, and Waterman, 1862). Poems on natural and literary-historical subjects, rather than historical subjects more generally, emerge to greater prominence among Sigourney’s nonelegiac poems over the course of her career. 15. Haight (Mrs. Sigourney, 175) notes that his bibliography makes no attempt to cover periodical contributions; Baym’s care in specifying the partial selection of Sigourney’s texts on which she bases her assessment is exemplary. 16. Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 69. Baym does not exactly attempt to account for the generic diversity of the miscellanies in detail or to read their genres in relation to each other; acknowleding that “[e]xtracting history from this composite distorts the genre [of the miscellany] as a whole,” she argues that “even when the focus is subjective and the intention to provide a complete inventory of a self complexly relating to numerous areas of experience, history is still there with all its public implications” (70). 17. Haight (Mrs. Sigourney, 78, 185 n. 185) finds the first reference in print to Sigourney as “the American Hemans” in Blackwood’s 35 (May 1834), but believes “it was certainly in use earlier.” Sigourney actively embraced the identification with Hemans, providing the introduction to a handsome illustrated American edition of her poems. See “Memoir of Mrs. Hemans,” in The Poems of Felicia Hemans (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1853), 27–46, in which Sigourney declares, “More than any other female poet of the motherland, she [Hemans] has been naturalized in our new western world” (45). Poe took note of the Hemans-Sigourney alliance with his usual ambivalent ferocity around matters of poetic mimicry: “we have watched . . . with a species of anxiety and vexation brought about altogether by the sincere interest we take in Mrs. Sigourney, the progressive steps by which she has at length acquired the title of the ‘American Hemans.’ Mrs. S. cannot conceal from her own discernment that she has acquired this title solely by imitation. The very phrase ‘American Hemans’ speaks loudly in accusation; and we are grieved that what by the

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over-zealous has been intended as complimentary should fall with so ill-omened a sound into the ears of the judicious.” [Edgar Allan Poe, ] “Mrs. Sigourney— Miss Gould—Mrs. Ellet,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (December 1835): 112. On Poe’s own mimicry of female precursors and the knotting of femininity with imitation in his work, see Eliza Richards, “ ‘The Poetess’ and Poe’s Performance of the Feminine.” 18. For a related reading of Sigourney’s authorship that sees her as acquiescent, however, in the domestic-tutelary complex’s embedding of the woman author in the prior authority of the mother, see Sarah Robbins, “ ‘The Future Good and Great of Our Land’: Republican Mothers, Female Authors, and Domesticated Literacy in Antebellum New England,” New England Quarterly 75 (December 2002): 562–91. 19. Mrs. L[ydia] H[untley] Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies (1836; rev. ed., New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856). Sandra Zagarell draws a similar observation from her reading of Sigourney’s Sketch of Connecticut, her semihistorical rendering of the town of Norwich, where Sigourney grew up. In the Sketch, the town of “N ” is ruled by a woman, Madam L, modeled on Sigourney’s real-life mentor, Jerusha Lathrop. Madam L ’s authority stems from the advice and charity she dispenses and seems notably pedagogical rather than maternal in flavor. Zagarell concludes that “Madam L is dissociated from motherhood and domestic life, for, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, thinkers like Sigourney’s friend Catharine Beecher had not yet infused women’s conventional roles with political resonance by giving motherhood the moral task of reforming the public sphere.” Sandra A. Zagarell, “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney’s Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” in Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797– 1901, ed. Sharon M. Harris (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 45; originally published in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 6 (1987): 225– 46. See also Baym’s concurring comments on the Sketch, in “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” 73–73. 20. “This halcyon period of existence was but too short. My parents having been forewarned by some well-meaning friends, that my proficiency in study, which they were pleased to say, was already more than sufficient for a woman, would create distaste for the duties that eventually devolve on our sex, withdrew me from school, at the age of thirteen, when in the full tide of improvement.” Letters of Life, 155–56. 21. Richard Brodhead’s study of Louisa May Alcott’s emergence into authorship in the early 1860s—contemporary with the waning years of Lydia Sigourney’s writing career—finds Alcott facing a literary marketplace increasingly segmented into “industrial” and sensational literature, high culture as represented by the then-new Atlantic Monthly, and a newly specialized “children’s department of middle-class reading” (Cultures of Letters, 85). 22. [Timothy Dwight,] “Mrs. Sigourney” [rev. of Letters of Life], New Englander 25 (April 1866): 348. The review excoriates at length Sigourney’s pompous style in Letters of Life but finds the chapter on education both the most interesting and the most unaffectedly written in the book, and concludes, “We commend the volume to every reader of these pages. He will be amused by

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the style; and entertained by the account of the olden time; and charmed by the good nature of the authoress” (358). 23. Here Sigourney’s account in Letters of Life accords quite closely with the earlier Letters to My Pupils; compare Letters of Life, 203ff. In both Letters Sigourney acknowledges how “onerous” she found the teaching of the “ornamental branches” in her first teaching venture with Nancy Hyde: “The supervision of the fancy-work that then entered into feminine training taxed us body and mind” (Letters of Life, 193–94; see also Letters to My Pupils, 166–67). 24. Sigourney observes in Letters of Life that Traits of the Aborigines of America “was singularly unpopular, there existing in the community no reciprocity with the subject” (327). Zinzendorff, following on her success with the 1834 Poems and other works, did somewhat better but still poorly by Sigourney’s standards, “pass[ing] only through two or three editions” (Letters of Life, 339). “Pocahontas” made its first appearance in Pocahontas, and Other Poems (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841), 13–38; it was the only long, footnoted historical poem eventually included in Sigourney’s Illustrated Poems of 1849. 25. Suggestively, the version of this scene of instruction set down in the earlier Letters to My Pupils (180) stops with the girls’ exclamations over history’s deeds of nobleness and cruelty, omitting the pupils’ more intimate twilight clustering around their teacher. Compare also Sigourney’s account of being withdrawn from school at thirteen: “This well-intended policy, which took the form of severe disappointment, disclosed in the end some of the sweet uses of adversity. Having the undivided use of a pleasant chamber, and access to good authors, I took a wider range of history and literature, than any school to which I could have access allowed; and the cheerful aid rendered to my mother, in her household cares, was so mingled with the solace of the pen, that a new, and more fruitful growth of happiness, like fresh verdure, overspread the garden of life” (Letters to My Pupils, 156). A privatized and lyricized deployment of reading and writing recompenses Sigourney for her loss of the formal social relations of schooling. 26. Here my reading of Sigourney’s elegies departs from that of Elizabeth Petrino, who reads the son mourned by the mother as the primary object of Sigourney’s child elegies; Petrino does not address those of Sigourney’s elegies not written to children and assumes that the mother is the pattern for all other social bonds, including the teacher-student bond (“Dickinson, Sigourney, and the Child Elegy”; see esp. 70–71). 27. [G. P. Whipple,] review of Illustrated Poems, by Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, North American Review 68 (April 1849): 500. The review is respectful of Sigourney’s career achievements but measures its praise astutely in comparing her accomplishments with those of Wordsworth. Such poems as “Unspoken Language” and “The Emigrant Mother,” Whipple observes, “penetrate the heart as inevitably as any in Wordsworth”; but “there is no combination” of their idealized affections “with those other human elements which, in their union, produce character”—“the affections as modified by sex, age, nation, position” (499). 28. Haight infers from Sigourney’s tepid characterizations of her marriage in

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her writings that the relationship became “perfunctory,” although “Mrs. Sigourney, years after love had fled, kept up a pretense of affection for her husband’s ‘elegant and scientific mind’ ” (50). Thirteen years older than his wife, Charles Sigourney seems in his own letters, as well as in Lydia Sigourney’s representations of him before and after marriage, cast as a sort of Casaubon (decades before George Eliot created the character); see Haight, Mrs. Sigourney, 16–19, and Letters of Life, 243–44. 29. The vicissitudes of genre in Sigourney’s career lend support to Caroline Field Levander’s argument that nineteenth-century American public culture was concerned with “highlighting the tone of the female voice, as opposed to its content.” Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14. Yet they also suggest that the elevation of “tone” over “content” was perhaps less historically uniform in American culture from its beginnings through the nineteenth century than Levander implies, and less uniformly successful in relegating women’s language “firmly [to] the private arena” (14). 30. These portraits carefully include both English and American women and represent women of published letters as points on a spectrum that also includes women who employed their educations in domestic life or public charities; thus Hannah More’s portrait, holding up for emulation an English woman of published letters, directly follows a memoir of Mrs. Jerusha Lathrop, Sigourney’s girlhood mentor, whose domestic life and life as an active citizen of her village were informed by education (Girl’s Reading-book, 160–79). 31. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2nd ed., trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1990), 128, 21, 107–8. 32. Mrs. L[ydia] H[untley] Sigourney, The Boy’s Book; Consisting of Original Articles in Prose and Poetry (1839; rev. ed., New York: Turner, Hughes, and Haydey, 1845), iii. 33. As “The Fireside,” Pocahontas, and Other Poems, 153–54. 34. Lydia H. Sigourney, “On Meeting Several Former Pupils at the Communion Table,” in Poems (New York: Leavitt and Allen Brothers, 1841), 56–57. 35. This list of overlapping poems is not exhaustive; nor does it even begin to include poems about the social relations of schooling that appear in one place or another in Sigourney’s works without being included in The Girl’s Readingbook (e.g., “The Schoolmistress,” in the 1834 Poems, 221–22). 36. “The educational awakening which was to give us the common school derived its main strength from the city,” as one standard whiggish history of American education puts it; see Adolph E. Meyer, An Educational History of the American People, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 173. Orville Taylor, a common school advocate and the publisher of Sigourney’s Girl’s Reading-book, suggests in his 1834 brief for public education how the growing class stratifications of antebellum urban life motivated the call for mass schooling: “on the one side . . . are the few, indolent, disdainful, proud, on the other the many, restless, envious, discontented. It is this which keeps the minds of a multitude in a constant state of irritation, and which, when the base demagogue seeks to array the poor against the rich, collects the crowd of his willing auditors, and

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arms him with his dreaded power.” J. Orville Taylor, The District School (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1834), vi. 37. Poems (1834), 13–16; Illustrated Poems (1849), 76–80. On the Token prize, see Haight, Mrs. Sigourney, 85. 38. “The Flourishing Village,” part II of Greenfield Hill, in The Major Poems of Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), ed. and intro. William J. McTaggart and William K. Bottorff (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1969), 396–419. For an extended discussion of Greenfield Hill as a version of “Connecticut Georgic,” see William C. Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 63–94. Sigourney was acquainted with the Dwight family personally as well as poetically, not surprisingly given the residence of many Dwights of her generation in Hartford. The Brooklyn editor and writer Theodore Dwight, Timothy Dwight’s nephew (and pupil at Yale College), was a lifelong friend with whom Sigourney frequently corresponded about publication matters; Timothy Dwight’s grandson and namesake Timothy Dwight, who would later in his turn become president of Yale, wrote the long essay on her life and work that appeared as a review of Sigourney’s 1866 Letters of Life in The New Englander (see note 22). 39. Haight remarks, “No one acquainted with The Deserted Village could avoid recalling it as he reads Connecticut River,” which “follow[s] Goldsmith in thought as well as rhythm” (Mrs. Sigourney, 85)—an oversimplification, however, of Sigourney’s deliberate reply to Goldsmith. Robert Lawson-Peebles more astutely observes of Greenfield Hill that Dwight’s choice of adjectives in his title “The Flourishing Village” “indicates . . . that Dwight’s poem will use Goldsmith’s to assert difference rather than similarity.” Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 144. Dwight himself, in his notes to “The Flourishing Village,” directs his readers to notice that his poem “is designed to illustrate the effects of the state of property, which is the counter part to that, so beautifully exhibited by Dr. Goldsmith, in the Deserted Village” (Major Poems of Timothy Dwight, 530); his following notes gloss the parallels line by line. It seems unlikely that Sigourney would have known of an earlier and equally overt American reworking of The Deserted Village, Philip Freneau’s The American Village, published as a pamphlet in New York in 1772; see vol. 3 of The Poems of Philip Freneau, Poet of the American Revolution, ed. Fred Lewis Pattee (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Library, 1907), 381–94, and Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression, 111–12. 40. The linguistic situation of early American nationalism has become the object of much interesting investigation in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s provocative double thesis in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed., London: Verso, 1991). According to Anderson, the modern bourgeois state is above all an imagined community created out of the simultaneity of a vernacular-based national print culture (76– 77); and yet in the first such modern nationalisms, forged in the Americas, “language was not an element that differentiated them from their respective imperial imperial metropoles,” indeed, “language was never even an issue in these early struggles for national liberation” (47). Americanists such as Christopher Looby

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have taken up the first half of Anderson’s thesis in taking issue with the second. See Looby’s lucid summary of the issues in Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), which argues that language was in fact a highly anxious stake in a new nation that imagined itself as “spoken into existence.” 41. Dwight interrupts his own celebration of Greenfield’s agrarian independence by acknowledging the fact of slavery’s existence, even in the American village (Greenfield Hill, II.193–220). Although attenuated by law and custom in Connecticut (“Here law, from vengeful rage, the slave defends / And her the gospel peace on earth extends” [ll. 207–8]), slavery nevertheless, as “fix’d submission to another’s will” (l. 214), is deadly to the human mind. Moreover, it links supposedly self-sufficient Greenfield to the still harsher slave economies of the Caribbean (ll. 279–344)—at least until Dwight abruptly rejects the topic by returning to the village prospect through the image of its church (l. 345). Less perspicacious on this subject than Dwight, Sigourney simply proclaims slavery alien to her village (“Alike the despot and the slave they hate”; “Connecticut River,” 14) and irrelevant to its agrarian economy. 42. The classical village grammar schools of New England seem to have declined during the eighteenth century, and more practically oriented writing schools (dedicated to vernacular competence in reading, writing, account keeping, and penmanship) to have enjoyed a corresponding rise; see Jon Teaford’s study “The Transformation of Massachusetts Education, 1670–1780,” in The Social History of American Education, ed. B. Edward McClellan and William J. Reese (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 23–28. Dwight’s favorable representation of the practical village school in Greenfield Hill suggests that he did not view this trend with alarm. Not only does the “Inferior” school come off honorably in comparison with the “Academic” school in “The Flourishing Village,” but Dwight also gives the farmer of part IV, “The Farmer’s Advice to the Villagers,” a brief in favor of practical education, beginning with the curriculum of the writing schools—learning “to read, to write, to spell, / And cast accompts”—and ending with moral history and philosophy, “the works, and ways, of man” (Greenfield Hill, VI.515–16, 532), but not including classical languages or literatures. During his own tenure as president of Yale College, Dwight established chairs in chemistry and natural philosophy; he “made an effort to keep abreast with scientific thought and was particularly concerned with stimulating scientific studies at Yale.” Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), 380. 43. The biographical sketch that prefaces Dwight’s posthumously collected sermons highlights Dwight’s success with his Greenfield academy: “In a short time, youths in great numbers, and of both sexes, not only from various parts of New England, but from the middle and southern states, as well as abroad, resorted to his school. . . . Numbers of them were carried through the whole course of instruction customary at College.” “Memoir of the Life of President Dwight,” in Timothy Dwight, Theology Explained and Defended, in a Series of Sermons, 4 vols., 12th ed. (1818; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846), 21. 44. The nearest “The Flourishing Village” comes to imaging the place of the elite college in the new United States is in its closing lines forecasting America’s

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future as a continental nation in which “new-born Oxfords cheer the evening skies” (II.734). The concluding section of Greenfield Hill as a whole, “The Vision, or Prospect of the Future Happiness of America,” gestures toward higher education in its expansive forecast of America’s prospective improvements in “Natural Philosophy—Poetry—Music—and Moral Science” (part VII, “The Argument,” Major Poems of Timothy Dwight, 506); but again, the concrete social location of that knowledge in an elite college seemingly cannot enter Dwight’s poem without decentering the social authority of the village. The only direct references to actually existing American colleges in Greenfield Hill are made by the farmer of part VI, who observes that he knows many busy men, “Illum’d by no collegiate rays,” who nevertheless improve themselves by reading deeply in their leisure hours (VI.555–60). Attendance at college forms a conspicuous part of the farmer’s story of an ideal-typical family’s descent from honest agrarian prosperity in three generations. The first-generation patriarch “daily swells” his store on his “widening farms,” but “Ambitious then t’adorn with knowledge / His son, he places him at college.” The son, “taught to think, converse, and please, / Ambitious, with his lady-wife, / Aims at a higher walk of life,” and so spends himself to ruin in pursuit of appearances (VI.600–615). Dwight famously took aim at the riotous living, lax morals, and speculative tendencies of Yale College students during his presidency; see Howard, Connecticut Wits, chap. 10, “President Timothy Dwight,” 342–401. 45. Not surprisingly, classical education became a point of some ambivalence for Dwight’s evangelical Christianity during his tenure in the presidency of Yale as well as for the composition of Greenfield Hill. See especially his sermon “The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy,” which denounced Yale students’ fascination with the French philosophes and the classical imagery of the French Revolution and condemned the moral lives of Socrates and other Greek philosophers. 46. Here Sigourney’s “Connecticut River,” like Dwight’s “The Flourishing Village,” does not fully represent its author’s actual experience in the social relations of education: Sigourney herself as a schoolmistress taught Latin to young women aspiring to distinction, and she intermittently trotted out her Latin as a published poet—only to be rebuked for her pretensions and her halfknowledge by classically educated men. The 1834 Poems in which she printed “Connecticut River” included a poem titled with a Latin tag, “Diem Perdida,” Sigourney’s attempt to render or remember the Latin phrase “I have lost a day.” As reviewers scornfully noted, this should have been “Perdidi,” accent on the first syllable. A lady need not know Latin, said the American Monthly Magazine, but let her beware “if . . . she choose to introduce words of a language she does not understand” (quoted in Haight, Mrs. Sigourney, 105). Moreover, as Sigourney would have known and appreciated, Timothy Dwight’s attitude toward the education of women was also advanced in ways not fully indicated by his Greenfield Hill. At the academy Dwight established in Greenfield Hill, “female pupils were instructed in many of the higher branches of literature, which had not, here, previously been taught to their sex” (“Memoir of the Life of President Dwight,” 21). 47. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 117, 116; see also John Sitter, Literary Loneli-

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ness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), chap. 3. 48. “The Deserted Village,” ll. 407, 410. Raymond Williams concludes of “The Deserted Village” that “in this mode of remembering, the objects seem to dissolve, in what is really a self-regarding poetic exercise”; in the end, “the social forces which are dispossessing the village are seen as simultaneously dispossessing poetry,” at the cost of understanding the actual social relations of history. The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 76–77. 49. Dwight’s rewriting of Gray’s “noble rage” as the Indian’s “vindictive rage” rehearses, of course, Anglo-American Christian censures of the revenge ethic of Native Americans, but it also corroborates Guillory’s skepticism about readings of Gray’s “Elegy” that are suspiciously quick to read that poem’s “rage” as ardor only: as Guillory observes, “it seems prematurely defensive to rule out as simply irrelevant any other sense of rage, as though it were ridiculous to imagine that the perennially impoverished would be anything but content with the frustration of their native talents” (Cultural Capital, 106). 50. Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut, 79. 51. Dowling, citing this line, declares that “Dwight is clear-eyed and uncompromising about the matter of European guilt” (ibid., 78) in destroying an “innocent people.” In context, however, Dwight’s condemnation of European “Avarice” seems somewhat less than uncompromising. Dwight regrets this avarice as an unnecessary excess of the European conquest, one that unfortunately interfered with Elliot’s and Mayhew’s Christianizing of the Indians and gave the Pequods provocation and excuse for being the “fierce, dark, and jealous” vengeance seekers they were in their unsaved state (IV.316–18), which is not a state of innocence but of human natural depravity. 52. As Julie Ellison observes, Dwight in Greenfield Hill “[m]akes the codependences of the poetry of prospect and the history of conquest fully explicit.” Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 144. Conversely, as William Dowling points out, “the georgic vision of Greenfield Hill is already carried within” the epic mode of The Conquest of Canaan, especially in Joshua’s vision in book X, in which he sees Canaan (i.e., Connecticut) as a visionary prospect before him (Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut, 67). 53. See Nina Baym’s “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney” for an extended appreciation of Sigourney’s lifelong engagement with the moral problem the Native Americans presented for her evangelical Christian nationalism; and, for a briefer treatment of the same theme, Tricia Lootens, “Hemans and Her American Heirs: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry and National Identity,” in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830–1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 243–60. 54. “And when new regions prompt their feet to roam, / And fix, in untrod fields, another home, / No dreary realms our happy race explore, / Nor mourn their exile from their native shore” (Greenfield Hill, II.677–80). Dwight pictures families strengthened rather than sundered by further westward emigration:

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“There cheaper fields the numerous houshold charm, / And the glad sire gives every son a farm” (II.691–92). 55. Sigourney, Lucy Howard’s Journal, preface. 56. In poems like these, Lucy Howard’s Journal fictionalizes the emergence of women’s poetry out of what Mary Louise Kete calls the “sentimental collaborations” of unpublished poetic exchange. Kete observes that “Sigourney’s poetry operated in two separate, though related economies—the commerical economy in which she was a path-breaker for women’s rights, and the kind of noncommerical gift economy which . . . enabled community through the establishment of reciprocal bonds of affection and responsibility among individuals otherwise only tenuously connected.” Sentimental Collaborations, 138. Kete generally takes the second, noncommercial gift economy to be the primary matrix for Sigourney’s career and that of other women poets. The arc of Sigourney’s career and the place of Lucy Howard’s Journal in it suggest to me, rather, that Sigourney’s self-representation in the noncommercial sentimental gift economy may be (at least in part) a back-formation from her print identity.

Chapter Three. Poetry, Slavery, Personification: Maria Lowell’s “Africa” 1. Sanchez-Eppler, ´ Touching Liberty, 24; Lee Chambers-Schiller, “ ‘A Good Work among the People’: The Political Culture of the Boston Antislavery Fair,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 258. See also in the same volume Debra Gold Hansen, “The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Limits of Gender Politics,” 45–65. 2. In her brief essay accompanying a late nineteenth-century reprinting of “Africa,” Caroline Dall volunteers that “it may interest your English readers to know that many English friends contributed to the volume of the Liberty Bell in which ‘Africa’ was first published. Among them were Lady Byron, Harriet Martineau, Sir John Bowring, Thomas Sturge, and Richard D. Webb. Among the American names were those of Eliza Follen, Wendell Phillips, Maria Chapman, William Henry Channing, William Lloyd Garrison, and my own.” Caroline H[ealey] Dall, in Poet Lore 10 (1898): 24–25. 3. Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 128, quoting the circular for “The Sixteenth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar,” December 21, 1849. Like other nineteenth-century holiday-season gift books, the Liberty Bell was produced for a gift economy in which “material accumulation and status emulation” went hand in hand with “denser social meaning”; see Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Books, Reading, and the World of Goods in Antebellum New England,” American Quarterly 48 (1996): 597. The social meanings expressed by buying and exchanging the Liberty Bell were especially complex, condensing personal affective bonds with class solidarity and political activism.

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4. On anti-Catholic rhetoric in American abolitionism, see Jenny Franchot, The Road to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 103. 5. Alan J. Bewell, “The Political Implication of Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (summer 1986): 226, 221. 6. [Armory D. Mayo], “The Poetry of Keats,” Massachusetts Quarterly Review 2 (September 1849): 419. For a survey of Shelley’s reception in the nineteenth-century United States and in New England particularly, see Julia Power, Shelley in America in the Nineteenth Century: His Relation to American Critical Thought and His Influence (1940; repr., New York: Gordian Press, 1969), 9– 69. 7. Sacvan Bercovitch, “Pierre, or the Ambiguities of American Literary History,” in The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 219. For a more detailed survey of the changing tenor of American reactions to the events of 1848–49, see Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), especially chap. 1, “Revolution and Response,” and chap. 3, “The ‘Red Revolution.’ ” 8. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “A Select Party,” in Tales and Sketches, ed. Roy H. Pearce (New York: Library of America, 1982), 952. 9. Robert Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 125. 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Monadnoc,” in Collected Poems and Translations, ed. Harold Bloom and Paul Kane (New York: Library of America, 1994), 56. 11. [Lydia Maria Child], Evenings in New England, Intended for Juvenile Amusement and Instruction, by an American Lady (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard & Co., 1824), 1–3. Innumerable editions of Doctor Hugh Blair’s Rhetoric circulated as school texts, in both Great Britain and the United States, through the mid–nineteenth century. During the Revolutionary period, Britain and the American colonies—often figured as “Mother England” and her rebellious child—traded mutual personifications back and forth vigorously in political cartoons that worked off traditions of Renaissance topographical personification; see Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3–14. 12. To borrow Bruce A. Harvey’s eloquent formulation, Robert’s aunt presents to him, in classic antebellum American fashion, “the world as a pedagogical spectacle”; American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830–1865 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 27–60. 13. It requires domestic tutelage in rhetoric, Child suggests, to stamp Robert with the meaning of “personification,” modify Robert permanently, to achieve in him a mode of reading capable of altering his identity. Later abolitionist literature, including Child’s own works, will amplify similar concerns with “reading as a physical act of inscribing stories onto the mind and having them

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stamped onto the heart,” in “a process of internalization” that “transform[s]” the reader; see Shirley Samuels, “The Identity of Slavery,” in Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 163. Carolyn Karcher, in her discussion of Evenings in New England, finds Child’s lessons divided between “the adult representing the ideology of the dominant society and the youth representing the instinctive sympathies of the heart,” and observes that the first lesson, “[i]ntended simply to illustrate the concept of ‘Personification,’ . . . gratuitously cites examples that draw children’s attention to the violence of white conquest.” The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 63. I am suggesting in effect (as the tendency of Karcher’s more general argument about children’s literature also implies) that the connection between personification and conquest is not entirely gratuitous for Child writing in this moment and this genre. 14. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2 (1822–26), ed. William H. Gilman, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Merrell R. Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 217. 15. Ibid., 218. 16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, with Selections from Parts Two and Three and Supplementary Texts, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 57. 17. Henry Sussman, “An American History Lesson: Hegel and the Historiography of Superimposition,” in Theorizing American Literature: Hegel, the Sign, and History, ed. Bainard Cowan and Joseph G. Kronick (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 38, 35. 18. On American literary reactions to the deciphering of hieroglyphic writing, see John Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980); on the history of European interpretations of Greece’s cultural debt to Egypt, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 19. Vivant Denon, who accompanied Napoleon’s invasion, saw the pyramids as an occasion for reflecting on “the gigantic pride which gave them birth . . . ; one hardly knows which is the most astonishing, the madness of tyrannical oppression, which dared to order the undertaking, or the stupid servility of obedience in the people who submitted to the labour.” Vivant Denon, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, trans. Arthur Aidin (New York: Heard and Forman, 1803), 1:139. Henry Wheaton, by contrast, writing for the North American Review, cast Egypt’s Pharaohs in the “patriot” role against oriental despotism, represented in this case by “the Persian yoke”—“rendered hateful to the natives by religious persecution as well as civil oppression.” [Henry Wheaton], “Egyptian Antiquities,” North American Review 29 (1829): 372. 20. G[eorg] W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:355, 361, 360.

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21. [Josiah Priest], Slavery, As It Relates to the Negro, or African Race (1843; repr., New York: Arno, 1977), 176. Writing in the Liberty Bell of 1852, a contributor self-identified only as a “backwoods girl” ridiculed Priest as a “Dabbler in Helicon and Deluge-slime; / Who writes of Egypt, with a knowing air, / And vows that Gliddon read nothing there, / Thus proving, against proof, the Negro race / Black in their nature as they are in face!” “E. C. W.,” “The Idiot Era,” The Liberty Bell (Boston: n.p., 1852), 164. 22. J[osiah] C[lark] Nott and Geo[rge] R[obins] Gliddon, Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1854), 191. 23. A theory promulgated by, among others, amateur archaeologist John Delafield in his An Inquiry into the Origins of the Antiquities of America (Cincinnati, 1839) and accepted by some prominent architects of the Egyptian Revival (at its peak in the 1830s to 1850s) in the United States; see Richard G. Carrott, The Egyptian Revival: Its Sources, Monuments, and Meaning, 1808–1858 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 50. The more famous first cousin to this vernacular racial theory is, of course, Joseph Smith’s claim for The Book of Mormon as the writing of the Lost Tribes of Israel, migrant from Egypt to America. 24. George M. Fredrickson, “Science, Polygenesis, Proslavery,” in The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 71–72, 90. 25. Agassiz came to the United States to accept an invitation to give a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute in 1847; see Edward Everett Hale, James Russell Lowell and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 197–200. On Agassiz’s conversion to polygeny and his role in the “American school” of ethnology, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 42–50. Gould found that Agassiz was “converted to the doctrine of human races as separate species” not entirely by abstract scientific arguments but “after his first experiences with American blacks” (43). Agassiz’s “The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races” appeared in the Christian Examiner 49 (1850): 110–45. 26. Samuels, Culture of Sentiment, 313 n. 4. 27. Nott and Gliddon triumphantly conclude, after canvassing hundreds of Egyptian portraits and skulls, scrutinizing lips, noses, and eyes, and classifying features as “Grecian, Semitic, Hellenic, Jewish” (Types of Mankind, 145): “the primitive Egyptians were nothing more nor less than—egyptians” (245). 28. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, 98. 29. Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 84. It is worth noting that Gliddon, after meeting John Lowell Jr. during the latter’s tour of Egypt, had been invited to lecture at the Lowell Institute in 1843–44, just a few years before Agassiz’s Lowell Institute lecture series on the genesis of races; see Gerry D. Shott, “Go Down into Egypt: The Dawn of American Egyptology,” in The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt ed. Nancy Thomas (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1995), 42. 30. Wendy Dasler Johnson, “Apostrophe and Personification in Antebellum Women’s Verse” (paper presented at the conference “Nineteenth-Century

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Women Writers in the Twenty-first Century,” Hartford, Connecticut, June 1996). For an instance of this crossing of idealist historiography and ethnological materialism, see Lydia Maria Child’s argument in the January 5, 1842, National Anti-Slavery Standard against polygeny’s notion of racial differences fixed in the creation of separate species. Conceding that “the races of mankind are different, spiritually as well as physically,” she frames the genesis of these differences dialectically as the “effects of spiritual influences, long operating on character, and in their turn becoming causes.” Physical difference represents prior spiritual influence, but the physical marks of difference then take on a life of their own, one capable of differentially acting back upon character. 31. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 99, 98. 32. Laura Wexler, “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform,” in Samuels, Culture of Sentiment, 17. 33. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 57. 34. Virginia Jackson suggests that the sort of “optative temporal loop” or “chiasmus between prolepsis and metalepsis” exemplified by Lydia Maria Child’s rhetoric lesson is basic to the “structure of sentimentality” and its projects of “reading backwards in order to project a future reading.” “Elizabeth Oakes Smith: The Poet and Her Needs” (paper presented at the conference “Nineteenth-Century Women Writers in the Twenty-first Century,” Hartford, Connecticut, June 1996). Marx and Engels also identify this rhetorical structure with idealist historiography, which “conceived the whole process which we have outlined as the evolutionary process of ‘Man,’ so that at every historical stage ‘Man’ was substituted for the individuals and shown as the motive force of history. The whole process was thus conceived as a process of the self-estrangement of ‘Man,’ and this was essentially due to the fact that the average individual of the later stage was always foisted on to the earlier stage, and the consciousness of a later age on to the individuals of an earlier. Through this inversion, which from the first is an abstract image of the actual conditions, it was possible to transform the whole of history into an evolutionary process of consciousness.” German Ideology, 94–95. 35. Kirk Savage observes, “More than any of the other arts, sculpture was embedded in the theoretical foundation of racism that supported American slavery and survived long after its demise. For racism, like sculpture, centered on the analysis and representation of the human body.” Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 8. Lowell’s poem challenges the racism of nineteenth-century monumental sculpture in a linguistic medium, drawing on literary idioms that are nevertheless saturated with similar problems of representing the human body. 36. Maria Lowell, “Africa,” in The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston [Chapman] (Boston: n.p., 1948), 23–28. All quotations of Keats’s poetry are from John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 2nd ed. (Middlesex: Penguin, 1977); of Shelley’s poetry, from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977); of Emerson’s poetry, from Collected Poems and Translations. When Lowell published “Africa,” the

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unfinished Hyperion and The Triumph of Life were available to American readers; Keats’s Fall of Hyperion remained unpublished until 1856. 37. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:360; Bewell, “Political Implication of Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics,” 220. 38. Emerson’s corrections to the Poems of 1847 underscore the importance of the eye in “The Sphinx”; where the Poet in the Poems declares that “Profounder, profounder, / Man’s spirit must dive; / To his aye-rolling orbit / No goal will arrive” (ll. 81–84), Emerson restores his own, earlier notebook pun on “orb / orbit”: “To vision profounder / Man’s spirit must dive; / His aye-rolling orb / At no goal will arrive.” See Ralph H. Orth, Albert J. von Frank, Linda Allardt, and David W. Hill, eds., The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 55, and Emerson’s own corrected copy of the Poems by R. W. Emerson (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1847), in the collection of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 39. Criticism has tended to see the “chief riddle of the poem” as “whether the Sphinx means to imply that the poet has or has not” solved nature’s riddle; in Stephen Whicher’s testy dismissal of the debate, “This seems to be one of those unresolvable ambiguities which occasionally add to the interest of literature.” Stephen E. Whicher, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 502. Thomas Whitaker, in the most extensive reading “The Sphinx” has received, judges the poem’s conclusion pat or formulaic, echoing the usual criticisms of Emerson’s poetry; see “The Riddle of Emerson’s Sphinx,” American Literature 27 (1955): 179–95. Lawrence Buell, by contrast, argues that “[t]he Sphinx escapes,” allowing Emerson to “atone[ ] for his sins of slickness” elsewhere in the poetry; see New England Literary Culture: From Revolution to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 133. My own view is closer to Whitaker’s. 40. “The Sphinx” shares its fundamental narrative of American romantic titanism with Emerson’s “Monadnoc.” But where “The Sphinx” is written in a Shelleyan aesthetic (despite the ambivalence of Emerson’s comments about Shelley’s poetry, Julia Power [Shelley in America, 24–25] judges “The Sphinx” the most Shelleyan of his poems), “Monadnoc” explores romantic titanism in the idiom of Wordsworthian naturalism. Tellingly, it is the Wordsworthian version of titanism in which Emerson worries overtly about the all-too-democratic accessibility of Monadnoc. A will to hermetic closure that operates on the level of metaphysical riddle in “The Sphinx” is naturalistically sermonized in “Monadnoc” lest everyone climb the mountain, lest the icon of democratic titanism lose its sublimity. 41. Orrin C. Wang, “Disfiguring Monuments: History in Paul de Man’s ‘Shelley Disfigured’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life,’ ” English Literary History 58 (1991): 638. 42. Ibid., 639; Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in H. Bloom, P. de Man, J. Derrida, G. H. Hartman, and J. H. Miller, Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), 68. 43. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal, in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (New York: John S. Taylor, 1836), 150. Lydia Sigourney similarly drew on this common understanding for her poem “Africa,” in many

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respects a simpler version of Lowell’s poem, which opens by hailing Egypt as “Land of the wise!—whence science broke / Like morning from chaotic deeps” and then, like Lowell’s “Africa,” proceeds from east to west, looking from Egypt to West Africa’s palm trees as she imagines them recalled by enslaved African Americans. Lydia Sigourney, “Africa,” in Poems; By the Author of “Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse” (Boston: S. G. Goodrich, 1827), 103–4. 44. J. M. Wainwright, The Land of Bondage; Its Ancient Monuments and Present Condition: Being the Journal of a Tour in Egypt (New York: D. Appleton, 1852), vii. 45. Caroline Dall, Margaret and Her Friends or Ten Conversations with Margaret Fuller upon the Mythology of the Greeks and Its Expression in Art (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895), 81, 84–85. 46. “Reader! let us imagine ourselves standing upon the highest peak in Abyssinia; and that our vision could extend over the whole continent, embracing south, east, north and west: what tableaux-vivants would be presented to the eye, no less than to the mind! . . . Do we not behold, on every side, human characteristics so completely segregated from ours, that they can be explained in no other way than by supposing a direct act of creation? Upon the moral and intellectual traits of such abject types no impression has been made within 5000 years: none can be made, (so far as science knows,) until their organization becomes changed by—silliest of desperate suppositions—a ‘miracle.’ Turn we now towards the north. There we behold the tombs, the ruined temples, the gigantic pyramids of Pharaonic Egypt, which, braving the hand of time for 5000 years past, seem to defy its action for as many to come.” Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 191. 47. “And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat—that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn”; de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” 68. 48. Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 188. 49. W. H. Bartlett, The Nile Boat; or, Glimpses of the Land of Egypt (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, and Co., 1849), 93. By contrast with nineteenth-century Euro-American representations, sixteenth- through eighteenth-century engravings tended to supply the Sphinx’s missing features, and to supply them as European; see the examples reproduced by Leslie Greener in The Discovery of Egypt (London: Cassell, 1966). 50. Denon, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, 1:140. 51. This phrasing is Judith Butler’s, borrowed from her discussion of Clare as a fetish in Nella Larsen’s Passing. See “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 171. Twentieth-century Egyptologists, especially British writers, can be quite testy about the persistence of this legend; Leslie Greener, for instance, firmly insists that the Sphinx was “mutilated by Sheik Mohamed in 1300. This exonerates the artillerymen of Napoleon Bonaparte, who have the popular reputation of having used the nose of the Sphinx as a target” (Discovery of Egypt, 38). Popular rumor, to Greener’s exasperation, re-

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fused and still refuses to cooperate in distinguishing between Arabic and European occupations of Egypt as between barbaric, mutilating conquerors and benevolent visiting cultural conservators.

Chapter Four. A Difference in the Vernacular: The Reconstruction Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 1. “From 1864 to 1871 Frances Harper crossed and recrossed the South, visiting every state but Arkansas and Texas, teaching and lecturing to Southern audiences and recording her impressions for Northern readers. The time that she spent in the deep South was a period of physical danger, intellectual challenge, and intense self-discovery.” Foster, Written by Herself, 134. Harper’s own letters from the South, published in William Still’s The Underground Rail Road (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872), are the chief biographical source for her lecturing and travels from 1866 to 1871. Frances Smith Foster’s A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: Feminist Press, 1990) reprints several Reconstruction-era letters from Still (122–34); see also Foster’s introduction, esp. 18–20, on these years. 2. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Truth,” in Foster, A Brighter Coming Day, 168–69; hereafter cited parenthetically as BCD. The Schomburg Library’s Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper, ed. Maryemma Graham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), prints the version of the poem included in Harper’s Atlanta Offering: Poems (1895), which adds a concluding couplet: “And o’er the fallen ruin weaves / The brightest blooms and fairest leaves” (Complete Poems, 84). 3. Carla Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (1995; repr., Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 122. 4. On Harper’s more extended feminizing of the Civil War in her 1892 novel Iola Leroy, see Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 195– 216. 5. On Harper’s use of sentimental conventions in her abolitionist poetry see Peterson, “Doers of the Word,” 125–28. 6. On other African American women’s relationship to their public embodiment as speakers, and white women’s frequently equivocal reactions to their public being, see also Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). On abolitionism’s appeal to the suffering African American body and especially the female body, see Karen Sanchez-Eppler, ´ “Bodily Bonds,” chap. 1 in Touching Liberty, 14–49. 7. Harper’s “The Mission of the Flowers,” an essay published in Moses: A Story of the Nile in 1869 (reprinted in BCD, 230–32), constructs a still more elaborate allegory of citizenship around a garden of flowers; when the fulfillment of the rose’s wish transforms all the garden’s various flowers into roses, sacrificing “the variety which had lent [the garden] so much beauty,” the rose learns “to respect the individuality of her sister flowers” (232). As in “Truth,”

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“The Mission of the Flowers” chooses to discuss embodied diversity on the terrain of the patently figurative, abstracted medium of floral allegory. This figurative refusal of directly mimetic bodily characterization was available to Harper in her poetry, speeches, and essays but less so in her postwar realistic novels. 8. Peterson, “Doers of the Word,” 38, referring to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s representation of Sojourner Truth; Peterson’s reading extends Jean Fagan Yellin’s in Women and Sisters. 9. Letter of February 20, 1870; reprinted in BCD, 126–27. 10. Michael Bennett, “Frances Ellen Watkins Sings the Body Electric,” in Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, ed. Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 26. Bennett’s essay examines Harper’s pre–Civil War abolitionist poetry, but his insight is just as important for her Reconstruction-era writings. 11. On somewhat similar lines, Michael Bennett argues that Harper’s antebellum poetry works through a “dual strategy” of “shielding the public body (hers and the slave’s) while making public the invisible body” (23). The “invisible body” in Bennett’s reading is the nonpublic, unowned body of the slave; the other invisible body made visible in Harper’s poetry is that of white supremacist power. Carolyn Sorisio’s “Deflecting the Public’s Gaze and Disciplining Desire: Harper’s Antebellum Poetry and Reconstruction Fiction,” chap. 3 in Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879, argues on similar lines, “Not only does Harper deflect the gaze from her body and the bodies of the slaves she represents, but she also turns the gaze towards the bodies of Caucasians” (81). 12. BCD, 167–68; also in Graham, Complete Poems, 81–82. 13. On how public commemorative sculpture came to memorialize the Civil War “common soldier” as a generically white American man, see Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 162–93. The whitening of Civil War soldiers helped nationalize memory of the war by minimizing differences between white Southern and Northern men; in so doing, Savage points out, “[t]he figure of the black soldier, inextricably linked to the memory of slavery, became unrepresentable. The whole idea of a ‘new world’ created by the war lapsed in favor of the advancement in civic space of a normative white soldier and citizen” (167). 14. For another poem in which Harper mediated between competing metaphors of heroism, see her “Lines to Charles Sumner,” which praises Sumner’s eloquence for its martial rigor (his words “fell as battle-axes / Upon our giant wrong”) but closes by linking it to growth rather than destruction (“God grant thy words of power / May fall as precious seeds / That yet shall leaf and blossom / In high and holy deeds”); BCD, 173–74. 15. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 7, 1854; quoted in Peterson, “Doers of the Word,” 121. 16. See Young, Disarming the Nation, 198–206, for a brief survey of how postwar African American male writers memorialized the heroism of black soldiers and of how African American women writers of the period, Harper included, “supported black men, but . . . also contested, implicitly or explicitly, the masculine bias of much black male discourse” (200). 17. Harper’s speech at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, “Woman’s

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Political Future,” reified the gendered opposition between (male) ripping up and (female) building up implicit in the dialogue between William Watkins’s abolitionist rhetoric and “The Little Builders”: “Through weary, wasting years men have destroyed, dashed in pieces, and overthrown, but to-day we stand on the threshold of woman’s era, and woman’s work is grandly constructive.” Quoted in Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper 1825–1911 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 223. 18. “The Little Builders,” originally published in Harper’s 1871 Poems; reprinted in BCD, 193–94; also in Graham, Complete Poems, 112–13, with minor variations of punctuation. Graham’s version also prints “When” for “Then” at the beginning of line 9. 19. The collective metaphoric body of African American education in “The Little Builders”—the coral reef uplifting itself by its own agency—contrasts with Harper’s later treatment of the institutions of African American educational ambition in her realistic fiction. In Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), the nearly white title character, after embracing her African American ancestry, becomes a schoolteacher to African American children—a plot that turns on the visible bodily distinctions between the teacher and her eventual students, rather than their collective faceless citizenship. The differences are partly generic and partly historical. Realistic fiction, unlike lyric poems, requires realized individual characters; and by 1892, education was part of a broader conflict over leadership and class hierarchy within African American communities. Cassandra Jackson observes that both Iola Leroy and Charles Chesnutt’s nearly contemporary Mandy Oxendine “reflect on the roles of black leaders in the age of self-uplift” through figures of mixed-race schoolteachers. The question posed for both Harper’s and Chesnutt’s teachers is whether any leader can represent postwar black communities in their growing internal tensions; Jackson argues that Iola Leroy’s elective identification with the black community, despite her nearly white body and privileged education, is Harper’s way of both acknowledging and fictively overcoming the community’s divisions. Cassandra Jackson, “ ‘I Will Gladly Share with Them My Richer Heritage’: Schoolteachers in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and Charles Chesnutt’s Mandy Oxendine,” forthcoming in the African American Review, winter 2003. 20. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Chambered Nautilus” (1858), in Illustrated Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 31– 32. 21. In Harper’s 1871 Poems, the symmetry between “Truth” and “The Little Builders” extends from theme to placement: “Truth” is the third poem in the volume, “The Little Builders” the third poem from the end. Harper’s later collection, Atlanta Offering: Poems (1895), included “Truth” but did not reprint “The Little Builders,” perhaps because its address to a particular audience so marks its Reconstruction moment. Atlanta Offering featured instead a later poem, “The Building,” that elaborated on the familiar biblical verse “In my Father’s house are many mansions” in very general Christian terms, without the historical specificity of “The Little Builders.” 22. Maryemma Graham, “Introduction,” in Complete Poems, xlii.

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23. “The Jewish Grandfather’s Story,” added by Harper to Sketches of Southern Life in its 1886 edition, further underlines the relationship between Moses and the “Aunt Chloe” sequence; the Jewish grandfather’s tales of exodus and temple-building directly parallel those of Aunt Chloe. 24. Carla L. Peterson, “Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and African American Literary Reconstruction,” in Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization, ed. Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 39–61, 43; Foster, Written by Herself, 140. 25. Moses: A Story of the Nile, in BCD, 139; hereafter cited parenthetically from this edition by chapter number and page number. Also reprinted in Graham, Complete Poems, 34–66. 26. For the canonical example, see the opening of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845): “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. . . . A want of information concerning my own [birthday] was a source of unhappiness to me even in childhood.” 27. In this respect, Moses anticipates later nineteenth-century reimaginations of the Civil War by black women writers: Elizabeth Young observes of these later works, including Harper’s Iola Leroy, “As the war is increasingly represented through reconstructed memory and invented fiction . . . mother-child plots provide a model for the transmission and reception of black women’s war stories” (Disarming the Nation, 203). 28. This strategy is not without precedent in the tradition of classical Mediterranean epic; consider the Odyssey’s many episodes in which Ulysses is succored by or tells his stories to women, as against the Iliad’s more narrowly masculine world. 29. “And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her [Moses’ mother], Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it. And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son” (Exodus 2.9–10, KJV). 30. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” reprinted in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory, 2nd ed., ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 404. Spillers’s much-reprinted essay takes aim at Daniel Moynihan’s notorious assertion, in his 1965 report “The Negro Family,” that “Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. . . . A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage” (quoted in Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 386). 31. Later in the century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton also focused her feminist reading of Exodus on Miriam’s slighted song, observing that Moses got nineteen verses to Miriam’s two: “Has this proportion,” The Woman’s Bible demands, “any significance as to the comparative happiness of the men or the women, or is it a poor attempt by the male historian to make out that though the women took part in the general rejoicing, they were mutinous or sulky.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible, part I (1895; repr., New York: Arno, 1972), 81. Where Stanton, however, is prepared to conclude that Exodus and the rest of

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the Old Testament were made by and for men, Harper remains invested in redeeming her scriptural tradition, the Old Testament included, from what Stanton describes as a history in which “According to the Jewish code, the father is the great factor in family life, the mother of minor consideration,” to the “subjection and degradation of all womankind” (83). 32. The classic essay of early feminist theory on this topic is Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 33. Foster lists the spirituals “Go Down, Moses,” “On the Rock Where Moses Stood,” “Deep River,” and Steal Away” as central to such retellings (Written by Herself, 139). 34. Quoted in Foster, Written by Herself, 140. 35. In Boyd’s apt summary, Harper’s poetry “challenges racist and sexist religious dogma with renewed faith and biblical knowledge” (Discarded Legacy, 88). 36. In Foster, BCD, 77–78, reprinted from the Provincial Freeman, May 24, 1856. Boyd (Discarded Legacy, 91) suggests that this unsigned poem “could have been the germinating nucleus” for Moses. 37. In Foster, BCD, 177–78, reprinted from the Liberator, January 14, 1864; also in Graham, Complete Poems, 93–94. As many readers observe, Harper identified Abraham Lincoln, as well as Harriet Tubman, with Moses (see Foster, Written by Herself, 140). Her emphasis in Moses on her hero’s unknown, unmarked grave may well have taken on additional urgency from the elaborate public ceremonies and fascination surrounding Lincoln’s decaying body after his assassination. For a reading of those investments, see Shirley Samuels, “Lincoln’s Body,” chap. 5 in Facing America: Cultural Iconography and the Civil War, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 38. “Aunt Chloe,” in Foster, BCD, 196; also in Graham, Complete Poems, 117. All citations from the Aunt Chloe poems are taken from BCD and referred to by page number. 39. The Aunt Chloe sequence leaves the source of Chloe’s surname “Fleet” unclear, but her son’s using it implies that it was their family name before he was sold away. His addressing her as “Missus” rather than “Aunt” marks his mother’s emancipation from slavery’s mammy role, alienated from rights in her own family to serve her owner’s family; Foster observes that Harper’s contemporary readers would have recognized her emancipated Aunt Chloe as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stereotypical mammy character, Aunt Chloe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Written by Herself, 151). 40. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, 69. Even the more conventional of Lincoln’s commemorative poets immediately after his death, however, tended to wrestle constructively with the inappropriateness of proud monuments to his legacy and made use of poetry’s license to avoid portraying directly what Savage calls the “intractable material” of Lincoln’s craggy, inelegant body. Thus Alice Cary’s “Abraham Lincoln” (1865) proclaims, “The mechanism of external forms . . . Were alien ways to him—his brawny arms / Had other work than posturing to do,” and metaphorically locates his monument wherever la-

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bor meets land in the postwar United States: “every ploughman turns his furrow down / As soft as though it fell upon his grave.” Similarly and more famously, Walt Whitman asks in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” how to make Lincoln’s sepulchre, how “To adorn the burial-house of him I love?” and answers not with Lincoln’s own image or with images of battle but with “all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen home returning.” 41. Harper’s contemporary James Madison Bell wrote an even more extended satire on Andrew Johnson as “Modern Moses, or ‘My Policy’ Man” (ca. 1867). Like Harper, Bell performed this poem and others orally in his Reconstruction-era reading tours; “Modern Moses,” however, unlike the Aunt Chloe sequence, remained unpublished in book form until Bell’s poems were collected in The Poetical Works (1901). See Joan R. Sherman, ed., African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 192, 199–210. 42. On the historical agency of freed African Americans in securing their own schooling, see James Anderson, “Ex-Slaves and the Rise of Universal Education in the South, 1860–1880,” chap. 1 in The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 4–32. In Anderson’s words, “The foundation of the freedmen’s education movement was their self-reliance and deep-seated desire to control and sustain schools for themselves and their children”; this desire “was rooted firmly in the slave experience and began to surface before the war’s end” (5, 7). 43. Harper’s prose fiction, both before and after Sketches of Southern Life, conventionally juxtaposes the Southern idioms of its African American characters with the formal, conventionally lettered language of its omniscient narrator. As Foster points out, however, many of Harper’s stories and novels—and even poems, including Moses—begin with extended dialogues (Written by Herself, 135), which have the effect of delaying the arrival of the interpreting omniscient narrator’s authority; see, for example, Sowing and Reaping (1876–77); Trial and Triumph (1888–89); and Iola Leroy (1892). What these fictional openings repeatedly stage is the emergence of polite literary language as the effect of what John Guillory terms a “differentiation in the vernacular” (Cultural Capital, 73), as if Harper wished to point her readers time and again to the contact zone in which literary language may be seen forming, in the contact between an overarching schooled, unmistakably written language and various forms of primary speech. Michelle Campbell Toohey links this feature of Harper’s fiction, in Bakhtinian terms, to the novel’s capacity to “connect with all social registers of language”; further, she suggests, the serialization of Harper’s novels enlarged their potential for dialogizing different speech forms, since “each new chapter of Harper’s serialized novels would have been read aloud as it became available, so that the oral nature of such an event became an opportunity for communal discussion and reflection.” “ ‘A Deeper Purpose’ in the Serialized Novels of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” in “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837–1916, ed. Aleta Fainsod Cane and Susan Alves (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 204. 44. Foster and Paul Lauter both stress the ways in which the idiom that Harper devises for Aunt Chloe self-consciously rejects the othering (for lettered mid-

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dle-class readers, black or white) extremes of nineteenth-century literary representations of “colorful” dialects. In Foster’s words, Harper “eschew[ed] misspellings and linguistic signals that befuddle the reader and constrain the speaker within preconstructed dialectical boundaries of pathos and humor” (Written by Herself, 152). Paul Lauter observes that “Harper carefully establishes . . . Aunt Chloe’s control of standard, informal English before . . . she presents her using a specifically Southern black locution”; “Is Frances Ellen Watkins Good Enough to Teach?” Legacy 5 (1988): 31. 45. Lauter, “Is Frances Ellen Watkins Good Enough to Teach?”; Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–33. 46. Th[omas] W. Hunt, “The Place of English in the College Curriculum,” PMLA 1 (1884): 131. 47. Albert H. Smyth, “American Literature in the Class-room,” PMLA 3 (1887): 242. For a representative denunciation of contemporary literature, see Morton W. Easton, “The Rhetorical Tendency in Undergraduate Courses,” PMLA 4 (1888): 19–23. In Easton’s view, “At no time in modern history has purely literary culture fallen so low as at present. The devotion paid to the physical sciences and, quite recently, to sociology, seem to have absorbed wellnigh all the energy of this decade” (20). Easton denounces present-day literary culture, however, the better to reclaim the English professor’s leading role as aesthetic arbiter in “the guild of literature” (20), aiming his professional sights against not only sociology but also the science-emulating philologists of his own discipline, the “scholar who cares for nothing but rotation, palatalization and vowel absorption, and never stops to ask what are the special artistic uses to which the language, as shaped by these processes, is applicable” (21–22). For a brief survey of the early conflicts between belletristic and philological versions of professional literary studies in the United States, see Gerald Graff and Michael Warner, eds., The Origins of Literary Studies in America: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1–14. 48. Smyth’s canon, to look no further, encompasses Thoreau, Whitman, Bryant, Hawthorne, and above all Emerson, in his view the American giant least understood by English critics (“American Literature,” 244)—in other words, the familiar American Renaissance canon as it began to take shape after the Civil War. For a critical reading of this moment of disciplinary formation that looks to its gendered exclusions, see Charlotte Avallone, “What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse,” PMLA 112 (1997): 1102–20; for a further reply to Avallone, see Mary Loeffelholz, “ ‘Question of Monuments’: Emerson, Dickinson, and American Renaissance Portraiture,” Modern Language Quarterly 59 (1998): 445–69. 49. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, esp. chaps. 4–6. 50. Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 27, 5; Ammons tacitly acknowledges that her argument for “the art of Iola Leroy” runs against the grain of “Harper’s claims that she was not an artist, but rather just a teller of truths” (27). 51. Lauter, “Is Frances Ellen Watkins Good Enough to Teach?”; on American literary canon formation historically, see also Lauter’s “Race and Gender in the

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Shaping of the American Literary Canon: A Case Study from the Twenties,” Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 435–64. 52. Carla L. Peterson, “Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and African American Literary Reconstruction,” in Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization, ed. Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 43; quoting Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 79. 53. Foster, “Gender, Genre, and Vulgar Secularism,” 49. 54. Peterson suggestively maps the competition Harper refused by contrasting Harper’s postwar career in the African American press with Charlotte Forten’s pursuit of publication in elite venues like the Atlantic Monthly and the only slightly less august Scribner’s Monthly. After some early successes, “Forten was to find that the emerging postbellum literary system was rapidly reinstituting racial barriers that she ultimately could not transcend” (“Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and African American Literary Reconstruction,” 51). 55. The 1876 volume of the Christian Recorder began running notices of new and forthcoming books under the heading “Literary Items”; the books selected for this feature tended to be culturally ambitious, for the most part secular, and often white-authored (a new edition of Goethe’s Select Prose, Anne Leonowens’s Life and Travels in India, and a new study of Carlovingian history all were featured in the column between late 1876 and early 1877). Columns noting the contents of “Monthlies, By-Monthlies, Quarterlies” began appearing on a fairly regular basis with the January 24, 1878, number of the Recorder, which listed the most recent contents of Harper’s, Scribner’s, and St. Nicholas magazines along with the Unitarian Review and the Princeton Review; the March 21, 1878, column extended its range upward in cultural hierarchy as far as the Atlantic Monthly but also noted the more practical American Agricultural monthly. Harper’s own self-consciousness and ambivalence about the middlebrow African American culture she helped create emerged most directly in her late novel Trial and Triumph, serialized in the AME Christian Recorder. Anxiety over cultural hierarchy is one of the novel’s central themes from its opening dialogue, in which several women worry over the destiny of the novel’s heroine, Annette, whose “tongue [is] on fire” and who is coming to adulthood in an African American community increasingly stratified internally by the pursuit of social and cultural distinction—“an arena of wordy strife,” as Harper calls it, “in which angry tongues were the only weapons of warfare” (in Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper, ed. Frances Smith Foster [Boston: Beacon Press, 2000], 179, 196). Annette’s ambitions as a poet and Harper’s conspicuous insertion of poetry into the discourse of the novel’s narrator as well are shadowed by and strive to overcome the community’s debased aesthetic version of civil warfare. 56. Foster argues that Harper “was neither lost nor ignored” in African American cultural history; she traces Harper’s appearance in African American histories from William Still’s Underground Railroad of 1872 through the literary critics of the Harlem Renaissance, Benjamin Quarles’s Black Abolitionists in 1969, and J. Saunders Redding’s To Make a Poet Black, and notes as well Harper’s scattered appearances in turn-of-the-century white women’s histories of the

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temperance and women’s movements (Foster, “Gender, Genre and Vulgar Secularism,” 46–47). What this significant record of memory does not show, however, is that Harper was enlisted in the dominant pedagogical canon of American literature at the time of its 1880s formation or later, up until the moment of her “recovery” in the 1980s. 57. Werner’s Magazine 26 (February 1901): frontispiece. 58. “The Expressional Power of the Colored Race,” Werner’s Magazine 26 (February 1901): 466, 477. On Harper’s actual education at her uncle’s academy, the William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, see Foster, introduction to BCD, 6–7. 59. On Fran¸cois Delsarte’s presence in nineteenth-century American popular elocution, see Nan Johnson, “The Popularization of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: Elocution and the Private Learner,” in Oratorical Culture in NineteenthCentury America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, ed. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 144. 60. Dorothy Dix, “Higher Culture in Dixie,” Werner’s Magazine 29 (August 1902): 833–34; emphasis in original. 61. On nineteenth-century romantic racialism, see Frederickson, Black Image in the White Mind; on romantic racialism in the production and reception of antebellum minstrelsy, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 32– 37. Dix’s reading of black expression professionalizes the associations made by some black cultural nationalists of the nineteenth century, like Martin Delany, between oratorical power and African American racial identity; see Lott, Love and Theft, 33. 62. For an example of the early Modern Language Association’s different attitude toward linguistic diversity, see Alc´ee Fortier, “The French Language in Louisiana and the Negro-French Dialect,” PMLA 1 (1884–85): 96–111. Fortier’s philology directly translates Lousiana’s hierarchies of race and class into hierarchies of linguistic descent measured by degrees of decay from a pure origin; he prizes “the purity of our language in Louisiana,” that is, in “the higher classes of society” (99, 98) over Acadian French, and still more over the “ridiculous . . . dialect” of “Negro-French,” the condensed formulations of which Fortier attributes to “the want of energy of the person speaking” (101–2). The differences Fortier assesses diachronically, through philology, elocution tends to understand synchronically—as social relations among different languages in the present. 63. Mary S. Hopkins, “Mar Ellen Attends a School of Elocution,” Werner’s Magazine 28 (October 1901): 317–19. 64. Carrie Bramen, The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 175–76. 65. In their professional anxiety, elocutionists aimed their sights at creating demand for their services among elite speakers, especially men of the professions by then better established, as well as among speakers outside the polite norm. As one indignant editorial in Werner’s observed, “The large number of men

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occupying places on the lyceum platform, or standing in the pulpit, or practising at the bar, come from colleges and universities, from laboratories and libraries, from farms and palaces, without ever passing through the studio of the elocutionist. In other words, they are reaping material success, abundant financial reward, without our ministrations”—a situation, implied the writer, that could not be remedied too soon. “Enemies inside the Elocution Profession,” Werner’s Magazine 26 (November 1900): 203–5. 66. Ibid., 203. The place of elocution in relation to “professors of letters” in 1900 anticipates the place occupied by composition instruction in relation to literary studies in 2000; modern university departments of communication are more directly the successors, in today’s disciplinary terms, to turn-of-the-century elocution. 67. A regular column in Werner’s was titled “Educators and Entertainers,” again underlining how elocution as a profession attempted to group social actors separated by later historical developments. On the slow waning of mass appetite for oratory in the later nineteenth-century United States, see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow. 68. Marcellus R. Ely, “Elocution in Education,” Werner’s Magazine 27 (July 1901): 345–46; quoting William James from the March 1899 Atlantic Monthly.

Chapter Five. “Plied from Nought to Nought”: Helen Hunt Jackson and the Field of Emily Dickinson’s Refusals 1. Domhnall Mitchell, Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 249; emphasis Mitchell’s. 2. Ibid., 250, 249; Bourdieu, “Conquest of Autonomy,” 70–71. 3. Mitchell, Emily Dickinson, 250, 249. Dickinson’s most recent full-scale biographer, Albert Habegger, observes that Dickinson criticism fundamentally splits between the modernist-pioneer Dickinson (emergent, in Mitchell’s terms) and the nineteenth-century-woman Dickinson (residual); in his judgment, “Each of these two approaches gets something right. But aside from the obvious fact that they are fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable, both distort her historical reality. . . . What must be noted here is the dubiousness of construing this profoundly one-of-a-kind writer by first enrolling her in any group at all.” My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), xii. But his critical division, I would agree with Mitchell, is not so external to Dickinson’s own mind and practice as Habegger makes out. In a larger perspective, this chapter will argue, the logical incommensurability of these two critical Dickinsons reflects historically real and changing divisions in the cultural field in which she wrote and was eventually received. For an invaluable compendium of Dickinson’s early reception, see Willis J. Buckingham, ed., Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). For an extended argument about how Dickinson emerged into both modernism and American literary nationalism, see Timothy Morris, Becoming Canonical in American Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 54–80; Dickinson, Morris suggests, “could function

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within modernism as a provincial voice, one of William Carlos Williams’s ‘pure products of America,’ granted, but like them, ‘crazy’ ” (70). 4. This metaphor comes to me from James Merrill, who uses it in his memoir to describe his own relationship to the parallel periodizations of modern sexual identities: “As in the classic account of Sarah Bernhardt descending a spiral staircase—she stood still and it revolved about her—my good fortune was to stay in one place while the closet simply disintegrated.” James Merrill, A Different Person: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 192. 5. April 15, 1862; Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:403. 6. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Helen Jackson (H. H.),” in Short Studies of American Authors (Boston: Lea and Shepard, 1880), 41; first published in Literary World, October 25, 1879. 7. According to Ruth Odell’s biography of Jackson, “At one time the Doctor [Josiah Holland] thought so highly of her that he planned to fill one number of his magazine with her works.” Ruth Odell, Helen Hunt Jackson (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939), 113. Holland is generally assumed, along with Samuel Bowles, to have been one of the two “Editors of Journals” whom Dickinson wrote of to Higginson as having “asked me for my Mind” in 1862 (Letters 2:404–5); if so, however, he does not seem to have pursued Dickinson’s mind especially vigorously, either during his time with the Springfield Republican or on becoming editor of Scribner’s in 1870. On the Hollands’ benign neglect of Dickinson as a poet, see Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 593–625. 8. A Masque of Poets (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878), printed Dickinson’s “Success” from a transcript supplied by Helen Hunt Jackson. On Dickinson’s relationship with Jackson generally, Sewall, Life of Emily Dickinson, 577–92, remains the best biographical source. 9. See, for example, the chapter on Helen Hunt Jackson in Susan CoultrapMcQuin’s Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 137–66. That the two most recent dissertations on Jackson both focus on her “literary career” underlines the continuing potency of professionalism as the historical narrative through which Jackson is most readable (and Dickinson not, or only by contrast): see Wendy Scribner, “The Literary Career of Helen Hunt Jackson: A Study in American Idealism and Realism” (DAI 1990 51:2, 507A), and Catherine Hale Phillips, “Helen (Hunt) Jackson and Her Literary Career” (DAI 1997 Nov., 58:5, 1712, Harvard Univ.). 10. Joanne Dobson, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), xi, 81. Implicit in Dobson’s judgment here is the assumption that the status or autonomy of culture is not a “structure” important to “society as a whole.” 11. Mitchell invokes Bourdieu in several instances explicitly (see Emily Dickinson, 44, 83, 102) and more often implicitly; his is the first book-length study of Dickinson to do so.

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12. Betsy Erkkila, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 51. 13. An argument I have made elsewhere; see Mary Loeffelholz, “Prospects for the Study of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry,” Resources for American Literary Study 25, no. 1 (1999): 1–25, esp. 15–17. 14. Dobson’s study, although it reaches conclusions similar to Mitchell’s and Erkkila’s in many respects, unlike theirs addresses itself frankly at other points to conservative women writers (such as Susan Warner, 36), and importantly acknowledges the overlap between concern for pressing social issues like slavery and conservatism in other social views among nineteenth-century American women writers (81). Although much less respectful than Dobson, Erkkila, or Mitchell of nineteenth-century women writers’ politically redemptive or enlightened versions of sentiment (which he sets against the protomodern “dark new women’s literature” of the 1850s and 1860s), David S. Reynolds’s chapter “The American Women’s Renaissance and Emily Dickinson,” in Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 387–437, similarly compares Dickinson with the prose rather than the poetry of her contemporaries. 15. Noting how salient the list as form has been in debates over literary canons and their openings, John Guillory suggests that “the fetishized mass cultural form of the list, as an instance of the social imaginary, determines the form of the critique of the canon in the university, the fixation on the syllabus as an exclusive list” (Cultural Capital, 36). 16. Similarly, Vivian Pollak’s essay on the Jackson-Dickinson relationship, “American Women Poets Reading Dickinson: The Example of Helen Hunt Jackson,” in The Emily Dickinson Handbook, ed. Gudrun Grabher, Roland Hagenbuchle, ¨ and Cristanne Miller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 323–41, which treats Jackson’s response to Dickinson chiefly in terms of her efforts to publish Dickinson’s writing, ventures a fairly extended biographical reading of Jackson’s Ramona and her Indian activism (326–28) but offers no direct comparisons between Jackson’s and Dickinson’s poems. 17. Pierre Bourdieu, “Flaubert and the French Literary Field,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 172, 166. 18. “I dedicate ‘Kathrina,’ the work of my hand, to Elizabeth, the wife of my heart.” J[osiah] G. Holland, Kathrina: Her Life and Mine, in a Poem (1867; repr., New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Company, 1877). 19. [Josiah Holland,] “Women in Literature,” Springfield Republican, August 7, 1858, 4. On Holland’s authorship of this unsigned essay, see Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, 383; Habegger assumes that Aurora Leigh is in the essay’s sights. Holland’s ambivalence about women as authors did not preclude extravagant admiration for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom he elsewhere called “the greatest poetess of our century, if not all time”; she “soared and sang as never women soared and sang before,” even while her “heart was the dwelling-place of an all-controlling, all-subordinating Christian principle.”

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Quoted in H[arriett] M[errick] Plunkett, Josiah Gilbert Holland (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 76–77. 20. Cora Kaplan, ed., Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (London: Women’s Press, 1978), II.183–84. All quotations from Aurora Leigh are taken from this edition and cited parenthetically. 21. “Mass culture as woman” is Andreas Huyssen’s phrase in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 22. Sewall, Life of Emily Dickinson, 595. 23. As an obituary for Holland in the New York Post commented, his writing “had the immense advantage . . . of keeping on a plane of thought just above that of a vast multitude of readers”; quoted in Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, 308. 24. “Belles Lettres,” New Englander and Yale Review 26, no. 101 (October 1867): 783. In almost identical words, R. H. Howard’s review for the Ladies’ Repository 1, no. 2 (February 1868), calls Kathrina “a metrical tale, or novel in verse, somewhat like Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh,’ or Tennyson’s ‘Princess.’ ” 25. Cf. Aurora’s later, uneasy meditations, partly inspired by Romney’s fulminations, on whether women “must have mediators / Betwixt our highest conscience and the judge,” and whether this debilitates women as artists; AL V.49–50. 26. Aurora’s first poems earn her both critical praise and dubious popularity with readers who sign their letters with “initials twined / Of lilies, or a heart marked Emily” (AL III.212–13). She vows to “work / To better ends, or play in earnest” (III.242–43); but even her second effort leaves her “sad: / I cannot thoroughly love a work of mine” (V.410–11), a sadness determined both by art’s inevitable falling short of its creator’s ideal and by Romney’s absence from her life. 27. The logic of Kathrina’s plot strikingly echoes the wider nineteenth-century pattern of women “bearing” male language that Margaret Homans describes in Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in NineteenthCentury Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 28. Review of Kathrina, “Reviews and Literary Notices,” Atlantic Monthly 38, no. 224 (January 1868): 764, 763. 29. Sewall observes that Holland’s father “was no Squire Fowler Dickinson but a perennially unsuccessful inventor and machinist, who led his family from town to town in western Massachusetts” (Life of Emily Dickinson, 595). The Atlantic’s review, in its caustic summary of Kathrina’s plot, notes that “the hero surpasses all the other boys in everything, and but repeats his triumphs later when he goes to Amherst College” (763); the wishful egotism of the plot, implied by the reviewer, takes on a more nakedly compensatory dimension in light of Josiah Holland’s inability to afford any college education whatsoever as a young man (Sewall, Life of Emily Dickinson, 595). More charitably but still condescendingly, the Yale-educated poet, critic, anthologist, and stockbroker Edmund Clarence Stedman would later write in his elegy for Holland that “His [was] the longing heart / For what his youth had missed, his manhood known,— / The haunts of Song, the followship of Art.” “J. G. H.,” Century 23 (December 1881): 307.

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30. “Reviews and Literary Notices,” 764; the Atlantic’s taunt echoes contemporary criticisms of the overstuffed and overly material style of Aurora Leigh. 31. See Guillory, Cultural Capital, 20; and Poovey, “Recovering Ellen Pickering.” 32. Lucy Larcom’s Idyl of Work (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1875) revisits Larcom’s 1840s youth in the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills in order to reconcile high midcentury and postwar transatlantic literary culture with American working women’s aspirations. Like Holland in Kathrina, Larcom is concerned with bridging widening cultural hierarchies and with how women can mediate cultural hierarchy and class privilege; unlike Holland, Larcom’s mediations cast women as subjects rather than as magical sacrificial bodies. John Greenleaf Whittier’s The Tent on the Beach (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867) represents itself as the poetic dialogue among three friends—an editor and sometime poet who can “well the market value tell / Of poet and philosopher” (12); a “free cosmopolite” (17) who believes that “Art no other sanction needs / Than beauty for its own fair sake” (44); and the poet himself, who in recent years “Had left the Muses’ haunts to turn / The crank of an opinionmill” (13). With some assistance from the editor’s wife (modeled on Annie Fields, married to James Fields), the friends try to reconcile postwar American poetry’s social aims, exchange value, and aesthetic claims. 33. The Dickinson family library’s 1867 copy of Kathrina is uninscribed. The family owned two copies of Holland’s 1858 Bitter-Sweet: A Poem, one copy an 1859 printing inscribed to Susan (Gilbert Dickinson) from Vinnie (Lavinia Dickinson, Emily’s sister), and the other the eleventh edition of 1860, inscribed by Edward Dickinson, Emily’s father. Bitter-Sweet features an eccentric, homespun woman poet, Ruth, who may bear some resemblance to Emily Dickinson. On Holland’s ambivalence toward women writers elsewhere in his writing, see Jonathan Morse, “J. G. Holland’s Moral Politics,” Journal of Popular Culture 12 (1978): 127–37. 34. In Johnson’s words, “No detail whatsoever, except what this letter reveals, is known about ED during the year 1867” (Letters 2:457). R. W. Franklin’s more recent dating of the poems similarly assigns very few to this time— twelve to 1867, eleven to 1868. For Franklin’s summary of Dickinson’s poetic production year by year, see R. W. Franklin, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 3:1533–34. 35. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “A Plea for Culture,” Atlantic Monthly 19, no. 111 (January 1867): 29–37. 36. Habegger, however, notes Dickinson’s emotional interest in the Hollandses’ marriage, which he suggestively calls “[t]he spectacle of ‘the dark man with the doll-wife,’ or ‘the Angel Wife,’ as Dickinson variously typed them. . . . But her attention was fixed less on the doctor, who never became a romantic figure for her, than on his wife seen in relation to him” (My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, 309–10). A well-known early letter from Dickinson to Elizabeth Holland congratulating her on Josiah’s return from a trip—“Am told that fasting gives to food marvelous Aroma, but by birth a Bachelor, disavow Cuisine” (March 2, 1859; Letters 2:350)—underlines Dickinson’s triangulated and

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archly distanced imaginative investment in the Hollandses’ marriage in terms that metaphorically anticipate, only to decline for herself, Kathrina’s eucharistic role in her marriage and in her husband’s relationship to culture. 37. In an earlier poem, “I bring an unaccustomed wine” (Fr 126), incorporated into Fascicle 6, Dickinson imagined herself dispensing a eucharistic “unaccustomed wine” that kills “The lips I w’d have cooled”; undeterred, she keeps carrying the cup. Unlike Kathrina’s, the sentimental mediations of Dickinson’s speaker kill. 38. Dickinson is known to have made at least five fair copies of this poem, of which four survive; the earliest surviving manuscript, from around 1864, was sent to Susan Gilbert Dickinson (Fr 819B). 39. Odell, Helen Hunt Jackson, 70. 40. Bourdieu, “Conquest of Autonomy,” 55–56 and passim. 41. H. H. [Helen Hunt Jackson], “No Man’s Land,” Scribner’s Monthly 22 (August 1881): 512. The version published in Jackson’s collected Poems differs in minor matters of punctuation and one conspicuous typographical error, “phase” for “phrase” in the poem’s second line; see Helen [Hunt] Jackson, Poems (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 239–40. 42. For a still more explicit redaction of the rules of art, see Jackson’s “Form” (Poems, 126–27; first published in 1870), which proclaims autonomous artistic form—“the line, the curve” to be “the hidden secret of all things” and a law unto itself, independent of human desire or need: “Thy [form’s] life know not of wish or will; / Inherent growths thy growth fulfil.” This religion of art is exactly what Holland’s Kathrina denounces in her caustic dismissal of art’s essential being as “A being of opinions. . . . / There is no fixedness / Or form of politics for all mankind; / And there is none of art.” 43. For an important early feminist inquiry into this set of prescriptions, see Nancy Cott’s “ ‘Passionlessness’: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology,” Signs 4 (1978): 219–36. 44. Higginson, “Helen Jackson,” 40–41. On her transatlantic fame, Higginson found it “almost exasperating to find that in England, for instance, where so many feeble American reputations have been revived only to die, there are few critics who know even the name of the woman who has come nearest in our day and tongue to the genius of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and who has made Christina Rossetti and Jean Ingelow appear but second-rate celebrities” (41). 45. Ibid., 41, 45. Higginson’s earlier unsigned review of the first edition of Jackson’s Verses for the Atlantic read the volume through the same opposition, contrasting those poems “in which an exceedingly high or delicate conception is embodied in a very perfect shape” (such as “Ariadne’s Farewell” or Emerson’s reported favorite, “Thought”) with “a class of more simple and popular poems” (such as “When the Baby died”). Atlantic Monthly 27, no. 161 (March 1871): 400. 46. Grace B. Faxon, “Three Women Poets of New England,” Werner’s Magazine 28 (September 1901): 26, 28. 47. Quoted in Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business, 155. 48. Atlantic Monthly 27, no. 161 (March 1871): 400. 49. [ ], “Some Recent Women Poets,” Scribner’s 10, no. 1 (May 1875): 104.

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50. “Nebulae,” Galaxy 17:2 (February 1974): 282. 51. Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries, 170. 52. Dobson, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence, 94; Walker, Nightingale’s Burden, 99. 53. A posthumous review of Jackson’s work put its finger directly on its aesthetic decorum, in terms like those of the Galaxy but less barbed, noting the “perfect dignity and restraint” of her verse (as against Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lack of “due regard for preserving dignity and reticence”) and the “tenderness breaking through” its “fine precision”; M. W. Shinn, “The Verse and Prose of ‘H. H.,’ ” Overland Monthly 6, no. 33 (September 1885): 317. For Jackson’s characteristic restraint with classical allusion, see, for example, “Ariadne’s Farewell” (Poems, 108). 54. For other abstracted, ahistorical aesthetic landscapes, see Jackson’s “Gondolieds,” set in Venice (Poems, 32–34) and “The Riveria” (Poems, 246). 55. “The Reign of Archelaus,” in “H. H.” [Helen Hunt Jackson], Bits of Talk about Home Matters (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), 51; originally published in the New York Independent, May 23, 1867. Higginson’s “The Murder of the Innocents” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly 4 (September 1850): 345– 56. On the same theme, see also Jackson’s “Children in Nova Scotia,” in Bits of Talk about Home Matters 71–75, which passes lightly over illiteracy and poverty in the province to exalt its children’s happy, healthy freedom from public education. 56. “Some Recent Women Poets,” 104. 57. In addition to Amherst Academy, Jackson attended the Falmouth Seminary and Ipswich Female Seminary (both in Massachusetts) and Abbott Institute in New York City, among other schools. On Jackson’s schooling, see Sewall’s Life of Emily Dickinson, 577, and Odell, Helen Hunt Jackson, 36–38. Higginson’s remark, via Holmes, about American writers who have “tumbled about in a library” interestingly echoes John Ruskin’s 1864 prescription for the education of women in “Of Queens’ Gardens”: “Turn her loose into the old library every day, and let her alone.” The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (New York: Longman’s, Green and Co., 1905), vol. 13, 130. 58. Among Dickinson’s favorite women authors, George Eliot seems to have shared her preference for such informal means of transmission over formal education for women; see Laura Morgan Green, “ ‘At Once Narrow and Promiscuous’: Emily Davies, George Eliot, and Middlemarch,” chap. 4 in Educating Women: Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 70–100. 59. Barton Levi St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 31–37. For other readings of “The spider holds a silver ball” as a manifesto of Dickinson’s autonomous aesthetic, see Albert J. Gelpi, Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 151–52; Greg Johnson, Emily Dickinson: Perception and the Poet’s Quest (University: Alabama University Prss, 1985), 44–45; and Paula Bennett, Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 45. Gelpi’s New Critical reading

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stresses the web’s self-sufficient craft; Johnson and Bennett, noting its destruction at the end of the poem, transfer aesthetic autonomy to the web’s creator. In Johnson’s phenomenologically inflected reading, the spider’s web is not a formal triumph of durable design but a “momentary triumph of personal vision,” to be succeeded by another vision whenever shifting “perceptual conditions” cause Dickinson to “adjust[ ] her stance as perceiver” (44, 45). 60. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 197; quoted in Mitchell, Emily Dickinson, 83. 61. St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture, 37. 62. A´ıfe Murray, “Kitchen Table Poetics: Maid Margaret Maher and Her Poet Emily Dickinson,” Emily Dickinson Journal 5 (1996): 285–96; Mitchell, Emily Dickinson, 171–72 and passim. Mitchell distinguishes his own reading from A´ıfe Murray’s romanticized, as he argues, will to see “kitchen table poetics” as somehow breaching the class barrier between Dickinson and her servants (171). 63. The Spider as an Artist Has never been employed— Though his surpassing Merit Is freely certified By every Broom and Bridget Throughout a Christian Land— Neglected Son of Genius— I take thee by the Hand— (Fr 1373, about 1875) 64. “The economic world reversed” is one of Bourdieu’s formulas for the logic of culture; see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed” (1983), in Field of Cultural Production. Barton Levi St. Armand’s comment on the “housewife” of Dickinson’s poem acknowledges her historical original in the Dickinson household but repeats Dickinson’s inverted figuring of the relationship between “housewife” and poet as destructive rather than enabling: in Armand’s words, “even the assiduity of new immigrants like Dickinson’s own Irish maid, Maggie Maher, cannot completely eradicate [the spider’s] delicate craftsmanship.” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s reading of “The spider holds a silver ball” in The Madwoman in the Attic suggests that the fate of the spider’s web was Dickinson’s way of asking herself, “What . . . if unsympathetic male editors and female heirs should sweep [her poems] efficiently away with all the other detritus of a forgotten, unimportant life?” (633– 35). If she did identify her literary executors with the housewife of this poem, Dickinson perhaps may be insinuating that “cleaning up” her work after death, behaving as officious literary servants, would de-class them, robbing them of the distinction they might otherwise acquire by association with her work. 65. Disagreement over the intentional or meaningful status of Dickinson’s manuscript line breaks—as well as their dashes, capitalization, and other marks of handwriting—remains one of the most contentious debates in Dickinson criticism. For Franklin’s defense of his editorial assumption that Dickinson’s line

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breaks are among the “incidental characteristics of the artifact” of the poem rather than at least potential meaningful, see his introduction to the variorum Poems, esp. 27–36; for further arguments on behalf of Franklin’s editorial practice and against readings of the visual manuscript like the one ventured here, see Domhnall Mitchell, “Dickinson’s Manuscripts,” American Literature 70 (December 1998): 705–37. Close readings of Dickinson’s visual poetics were pioneered by Martha Nell Smith in Rowing in Eden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), esp. 83–85; and by Susan Howe in The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993); see 134 for Howe’s exchange with Franklin on the editing of Dickinson. For an assessment of the manuscript debates, see Mary Loeffelholz, “The Incidental Dickinson,” New England Quarterly 72 (September 1999): 456–72. 66. Jackson uses the metaphor of “crossed threads” in a more commonplace context in one of her very early letters to Emily Dickinson, letting her know that “a Mr. Dudley of Milwaukee, spent a day with us last week, and we talked about you. So threads cross, even on the outmost edges of the web” (March 20, 1876; Letters, 2:544). 67. For Higginson’s early publication of the poem as “The White Heat,” see his essay “Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” Atlantic Monthly 68 (October 1891), 454; for a list of all the poems that Dickinson is known to have sent to Higginson, see Franklin, Poems 3:1552. The version published in the Atlantic suggests that Higginson’s copy was closest to the manuscript Franklin transcribes as 401B. Higginson later recalled for Mabel Loomis Todd that “H. H. did not know of her [Dickinson’s] poems till I showed them to her (about 1866)”; quoted in Sewall, Life of Emily Dickinson, 580. 68. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Village Blacksmith,” in Poems, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1853), 239–42. 69. The happy artist of “The Poet’s Forge” contrasts with Jackson’s “The Teacher” (Poems, 121), which pictures the didact as lonely, embittered male prophet, successful with his audience but disgusted with the world to which he brings sweetness and light. The teacher of this poem is a failed and alienated version of the autonomous artist, as against the wishful version of the relation between bourgeois poet and audience in “The Poet’s Forge.” For another Jackson poem that might possibly bear a relationship to Dickinson’s soul “at the white heat,” see Jackson’s “Triumph,” which praises the abstracted, isolated soul who successfully defies “invisible foes” and thus “knows / In what white heat the blood of triumph glows!” (Poems, 151–52). For another transformation of the tools of Longfellow’s forge into aesthetic weaponry, see Jackson’s “The Magic Armory” (Poems, 145–46). 70. As Paul Crumbley puts it, in an interpretation focused on the poem’s manuscript embodiment, “Read according to the manuscript evidence, the poem proclaims the accomplishment of poets who fabricate seamless works of art, while simultaneously revealing the sacrifices required for such achievements.” Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 8.

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Chapter Six. Metropolitan Pastoral: The Salon Poetry of Annie Fields 1. On James Fields’s tenure as editor of the Atlantic, see Ellery Sedgwick, A History of the Atlantic Monthly 1859–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), chap. 3, “James T. Fields,” 68–111. 2. Many of Annie Fields’s contemporaries and friends wrote memoirs or essays recalling the salon at 148 Charles Street; see especially Willa Cather, “148 Charles Street,” in Not under Forty (New York: Knopf, 1936), 52–75, and William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, ed. David F. Hiatt and Edwin H. Cady (1900; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 33–41, as well as M. A. DeWolfe Howe’s compilation from Annie Fields’s diaries, Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922). 3. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, chap. 5, “Jewett, Regionalism, and Writing as Women’s Work.” Brodhead here responds to a series of influential works in feminist criticism linking Fields’s and Jewett’s relationship, and nineteenth-century “women’s culture” more generally, to women’s communities not only in Jewett’s fiction but also in that of other women writers of regionalism. Among the influential “treatments in this vein” cited by Brodhead are Josephine Donovan’s New England Local Color Literature: A Woman’s Tradition (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983); Majorie Pryse’s introduction to Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (New York: Norton, 1981); Elizabeth Ammons’s “Going in Circles: The Female Geography of The Country of the Pointed Firs,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 16, no. 2 (fall 1983): 83– 92; and Sarah Sherman, Sarah Orne Jewett: An American Persephone (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England). Scholarship on late nineteenth-century American regionalism has expanded enormously since Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters, with many other kinds of critical recovery projects now joining those of 1980s feminism. Nevertheless, Brodhead’s argument still broods rather uneasily over, for example, the contributors (among them Elizabeth Ammons, revisiting her earlier perspective) to New Essays on “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” ed. June Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Debates over the political valence of women’s regionalist fiction, especially that produced by the women of Annie Fields’s salon, are of interest for my present argument partly because they so seldom attend to the poetry produced alongside that fiction. Annie Fields’s classical poetry is no less indicative of the cultural meanings of Jewett’s regionalist fiction than is the travel writing that interests Brodhead. Sarah Sherman grasps this point better than any other reader of Jewett in her Sarah Orne Jewett, which takes thoughtful note of Fields’s classical poetry, especially in her consideration of how Jewett’s and Fields’s relationship was informed by their self-fashioning (and others’ fashioning of them) in the image of the myth of Demeter and Persephone (84–90). 4. For one notable critical riposte to Brodhead, see Fetterley, “Commentary,” 600–611. For a recent restatement of the cross-class bonds of womanhood, see Jean Pfaelzer’s introductory essay to the recent special issue of Legacy devoted

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to the subject of class in women’s writing, “Discourses of Women and Class: Subjection, Subversion, and Subjectivity,” Legacy 16, no. 1 (fall 1999): 1–10. 5. On the rise of the new philanthropy in Fields’s post–Civil War Boston, see Judith A. Roman, Annie Adams Fields: The Spirit of Charles Street (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 78–88. 6. Annie Fields, “A Glimpse at Some of Our Charities: Part II, The Employment, Education, and Protection of Women,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 56 (March 1878): 596 n, 600. On Vassar as a pioneer of classical education for women, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s magisterial survey, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s, 2nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). 7. Fields, “Employment, Education, and Protection of Women,” 602. In arguing that “industrial schools are the only bulwarks against the tide of ignorance” for a significant proportion of pauperized adults and children, however, Fields did issue her hope that a wider extension of compulsory public education on the common school mode would “soon supersede some of the industrial schools” (606). Fields hoped, that is, that some of the children then being educated in industrial schools would eventually be placed—under compulsion, with their parents obliged by law to give up the children’s wage income—in schools teaching a wider common literacy. In her later philanthropic writings, however, Fields took a harder line on the necessity of industrial schools over education in and to reading, contrasting “a teaching which gives them [poor children] merely the power to grasp at the mass of sensational reading” with the kind of “practical training which shall give the boys trades . . . and the girls suitable occupations.” Mrs. James T. [Annie] Fields, How to Help the Poor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 48–49. Further, she pointed to the utility of all forms of children’s and adolescents’ schooling—“sewing-schools, Sunday-schools, vacationschools, kitchen garden, kindergarten, cooking-schools, . . . industrial schools, laundries,” and so forth—in “obtaining knowledge of families in the district,” that is, in surveillance of the poor (39). See Susan K. Harris, The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), for an extended biographical and historical consideration of Fields’s philanthropy and of what Harris aptly terms the distinctive later nineteenth-century “relationship between high culture and the culture of benevolence” (142). 8. The logic of not sacrificing precious cultural material while tending to more basic needs did not, in Fields’s view, necessarily extend to the talented poor: “if . . . our energies are spent in trying to elevate and educate the few, helping them up very successfully, as we may, we shall find a large body straying about the same as ever, begging and imposing on the community. . . . [W]e must do less well than we can for the few, until we understand the general need somewhat better, and have more help to grapple with it” (How to Help the Poor, 40). 9. Fields, “Employment, Education, and Protection of Women,” 601, 597 (quoting English author and reformer Mrs. [Anna] Jameson), 598. 10. On Fields’s recruitment of visitors, see Roman, Annie Adams Field, 83– 84.

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11. Annie Fields collected her biographical sketches, most of them originally published in Harper’s or the Atlantic Monthly, in Authors and Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896) and A Shelf of Old Books (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894). She also published several longer biographical works, including James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881); Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans, ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899); and Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897). 12. On the dynamic of “social aging” in the cultural field, see Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 59–60, 104–7. 13. Annie Fields, “Days with Mrs. Stowe,” in Authors and Friends, 193. 14. Annie Fields, “Tennyson,” in Authors and Friends, 337. 15. Fields’s anecdote probably harks back to her own primary schooling; her secondary schooling, at George B. Emerson’s School for Young Ladies, was rigorous in the sense she implies in her scorn for young ladies who can barely conjugate Latin verbs. Students at Emerson’s school “studied Latin daily for two or three years, added French and Italian, and eventually read both Virgil and Dante in the original” (Roman, Annie Adams Field, 4). Further, Emerson’s ideal of deportment for young women was excellent preparation for the world of the salon. “Superior intelligence, refinement and polish are essential to our highest idea of conversation as the most beautiful of the fine arts and the most precious of the useful arts,” he advised in his farewell message to his pupils; “and a talent for conversation is essential to our idea of an accomplished lady.” And while ladies were distinguished by the “pre-eminence” of their religious nature, “in the most perfect lady, as in the best Christian, the religious element must not be the most prominent. It must, like the warmth from heaven, be a pervading and all-controlling spirit, rather than a marked and visible characteristic.” The aestheticized Christianity of the salon is atmospheric, rather than discursive or doctrinal. Geo[rge] B. Emerson, “The Last Farewell to His Pupils” (Boston, 1855), 22. 16. Horace Scudder, “American Classics in School,” Atlantic Monthly 60 (July 1887): 89. Similarly, Charles Dudley Warner’s 1890 evaluation of the relationship between the novel and the common school complains that the object “of reading-books from the lowest grade to the highest . . . is to teach words, not literature. . . . The taste for good literature is not developed; the habit of continuous pursuit of a subject, with comprehension of its relations, is not acquired; and no conception is gained of the entirety of literature or its importance to human life.” “The Novel and the Common School,” Atlantic Monthly 65 (June 1890): 725. Warner’s essay distantly and Scudder’s essay more directly both concern themselves with the literary curriculum of the common schools as a means of promoting national identity, a concern peripheral to Annie Fields’s strenuously cosmopolitan belletrism, yet still very much of her aesthetic world. Richard Brodhead notes in Scudder’s Americanizing school curriculum the “social ulteriority so commonly coupled with professed worship of disinterested artistic ‘quality’ at this time” (Cultures of Letters, 135), but this coupling may not express bad faith so much as the working-out of the emergent aesthetic paradigm. Scudder contrasts his own program for inculcating national identity

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by means of integral, intransitive literary works studied for their own sakes with the sort of “patriotism” that might be attained by reading extracts of “the great, direct utterances of American poets, orators, and romancers upon the vital theme of our country.” Rejecting the direct thematic teaching of patriotism, he calls for curricula imparting patriotism as “an indiscrimated part of the whole body of American literature . . . its power is greater as one comes into acquaintance with the whole, and not with selected parts” (“American Classics in School,” 87). Scudder envisions a literary curriculum capable of transmitting patriotism as doxa, in Bourdieu’s terms, rather than orthodoxy—as automatic sensibility rather than discursive doctrine. See Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 164, and John Guillory’s illuminating chapter, “Ideology and Canonical Form” (Cultural Capital, 134–75, esp. 134–38), on the development of the similar Anglo-American project from Matthew Arnold to T. S. Eliot and the American New Criticism. 17. Distinct from the ethos of the common school, Fields’s salon was nevertheless intimately connected to the rise and expansion of higher education for women in Boston; see this book’s conclusion. In the late 1880s, Annie Fields did try her hand in the world of Christian literature aimed at girls (Roman, Annie Adams Field, 122–23). Her efforts even in this vein, though, distinguish themselves in their focus on the roles of elite women in social reform. See especially Fields’s essay “The Contributors and the Children: [Noble Born],” in Wide Awake, April 1887, p. 342, which recycles a version of pastoral—two girls, one noble-born and one from a poor family, raised together, return to visit the house of the poor family. As in all versions of aristocratic pastoral, birth will out: it is the noble-born girl who returns to live with the poor family, “real nobility” that “is not afraid to look misery in the face, nor to do hard work.” 18. In reply to Annie Fields’s gift of an advance copy of Under the Olive, Lucy Larcom wrote of recalling “the ‘Persephone’ and ‘Pandora’ ” with pleasure from Fields’s sharing of them with the Pandora Club. But Larcom was also provoked to defend the differences between her poetry and Fields’s: “The homely life of New England, of which I chiefly write, is as far from the Greek atmosphere which yours breathes as can well be; and I freely acknowledge the difficulties of my theme. But I must write of what I love best, and extract from it such poetry as I can find.” Lucy Larcom to Annie Adams Fields, November 22, 1880, in the Huntington Library Fields collection. 19. Annie Fields, “At the Forge,” in Under the Olive (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881; 2nd ed., 1881). On Fields’s classicism, see also Harris, Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess, 149–50. 20. Josephine Donovan, “Annie Fields,” American Women Writers, vol. 1; Donovan, “The Unpublished Love Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 4, no. 3 (1979): 26–31; reprinted in Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Gwen L. Nagel (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 107–17. 21. My phrasing here of course recalls Adrienne Rich’s influential conception of the “lesbian continuum,” which both drew on and in its turn helped motivate and shape feminist efforts to recover women’s attachments in literature and history in the 1980s and 1990s; see Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5 (1980): 631–60.

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22. One of the more conspicuous cross-dressing Shakespearean actresses in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe, Charlotte Cushman earned a reputation in her early years both as Rosalind and as Romeo; she attempted Hamlet in 1861, but it was not well received (reviewers complained of her age and weight). Her friendship with the Fieldses helped seal Cushman’s own respectability as an actress, as did her many Civil War benefits on behalf of Union soldiers; the benefits went both ways, as Cushman lent money to Ticknor and Fields in times of need. See Joseph Leach, Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 275–325. Cushman lived much of her life with women companions, and her last and longest love, Emma Stebbins, assembled a biographical memoir, Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life, Edited by Her friend, Emma Stebbins (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878). Cushman and Stebbins socialized and corresponded with James and Annie Fields as a couple, but Stebbins’s friendship with the Fieldses seems to have lapsed after Cushman’s death in 1876, and it is not clear how the Cushman-Stebbins relationship may—or may not—have served Annie Fields as a precedent for her relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett, which began as a friendship around 1877 and became central in Annie Fields’s life after the death of James Fields. Cushman enjoyed playing male parts, butch to Stebbins’s (and other women’s) femme, whereas Fields and Jewett seem to have imagined their relationship more as mother to daughter. In Eve Sedgwick’s terms, Cushman and Stebbins’s partnership was gender-transitive, Fields and Jewett’s gender-intransitive, although not separatist. See Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 86–90. On the motherdaughter qualities of Fields and Jewett as a couple, see especially Sherman, Sarah Orne Jewett, 76–90. 23. Annie Fields, “Ode: Recited by Miss Charlotte Chusman, at the Inauguration of the Great Organ in Boston, November 2, 1863” (Cambridge, Mass.: privately printed, n.d.). The “Ode” was also printed anonymously immediately following the ceremony in the Boston Daily Courier, November 3, 1863. Fields clipped the “Ode” from the Courier and preserved it in one of her poetry notebooks (Fields Addenda, Box 1, Folder 1, in the Huntington Library). 24. See Leach, Bright Particular Star, 325, on the performance and the following reception; and Rita K. Gollin, Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 38–43, on the preparation and reception of the “Ode” as marking Fields’s literary debut. 25. Shortly after the inauguration, the “Ode” was reprinted without its subtitle (Cambridge, Mass.: Welch, Bigelow, 1863), perhaps in an effort to gain for it some reputation independent of its original occasion. In this printing Fields revised its conclusion to read: Let the musician come, Fresh from that star where Genius has its home, Whose sympathetic soul Has burned beneath the horrid clash of war, One who has known,

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Estranged and alone, How sad the weary moan Of those who stay behind and latest reach the goal. His hand shall vibrate the responsive strings, Rising on supernal wings Of Music’s wondrous mystery. Now at his touch, unveiled are hidden things, Now falls oppression, and decay false kings; Through all the tones the cry of freedom rings A nation’s choral chant to voiceful victory. The revised conclusion feminizes the singer more emphatically than the original version by stressing his or her exclusion from battle, solitude, and helpless sympathy with suffering. 26. [Julia Ward Howe,] “How to Regard the Great Organ,” Commonwealth, November 13, 1863. 27. According to Howe’s biographer Mary H. Grant, “Julia, in her new position [after ‘Battle Hymn’] as public poet, fully expected the honor to fall to her” of writing the commemorative ode; further, “she suspected her publisher of trying to push his wife’s reputation at the expense of hers.” Private Woman, Public Person: An Account of the Life of Julia Ward Howe from 1819 to 1868 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1994), 150–51. On how “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” launched its author as a public speaker, see Julia Ward Howe’s own Reminiscences, 1819–1899 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899). As Judith Roman (Annie Adams Fields, 32–33) notes, Howe in 1863 already bore a grudge against James Fields for being slow to publish a series of poems, Lyrics of the Street, that he had accepted in 1862 for publication in the Atlantic Monthly. For the Howe–James T. Fields correspondence over Lyrics of the Street, see James C. Austin, Fields of “The Atlantic Monthly” (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1953), 106–14. Howe may have brought still another kind of jealousy to the occasion of hearing Charlotte Cushman recite Annie Fields’s words in public: Cushman was a friend of Howe as well as of the Fieldses, and in 1857 had agreed to play Phaedra in Howe’s blank verse drama, Hippolytus. Howe managed to interest the Howard Athenaeum in producing the play, but the engagement was canceled at the last moment, on the eve of rehearsals; see Grant, Private Woman, Public Person, 142–44, and Leach, Bright Particular Star, 286–87. Not only was Hippolytus never produced, but Howe never wrote for the stage again and was obliged during the inauguration ceremony to endure hearing her famous actress friend reciting a lesser woman’s (as Howe was convinced) words. Howe’s review of the ceremony, however, carefully exempted Cushman’s elocution from her general scorn. 28. The kind of large massed orchestra that Howe envisions in her review of the great organ inauguration would not come into being as a permanent cultural institution in Boston until 1881, with the founding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the leadership and financial backing of Henry Lee Higginson. Orchestral music in Boston up until the founding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was generally presented by touring orchestras and by private clubs like

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the Harvard Musical Association, and most of those performances were suspended by the exigencies of the Civil War. Not surprisingly, Higginson’s rhetoric in launching the Boston Symphony Orchestra would echo the aestheticized cultural nationalism of the great organ’s enthusiasts. “Notwithstanding the development of musical taste in Boston,” he announced in Boston area newspapers, “we have never yet possessed a full and permanent orchestra, offering the best music at low prices, such as may be found in all the large European cities, or even in the smaller musical centres of Germany”—the situation he proposed to remedy by founding a high-quality professional orchestra, resident in the city. Quoted in Janet Baker-Carr, Evening at Symphony: A Portrait of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 15; on the early days of the symphony, see also Philip Hart, Orpheus in the New World: The Symphony Orchestra as an American Cultural Institution (New York: Norton, 1973), 48–70. 29. Julia Ward Howe’s Reminiscences, written late in her life, omits any direct mention of the controversy over Fields’s “Ode” and the great organ but pays tribute to John Andrew, the wartime governor of Massachusetts, using the metaphor of society as orchestra and orchestra as army: “I have often in my mind compared society to a vast orchestra, which, properly led, gives forth a heavenly music, and which, ill conducted, utters only harsh and discordant sounds. The true leader of the orchestra has the music in his mind. He can read the intricate scroll which is set up before him; and so the army of melody responds to his tap” (268). 30. For various opinions on how closely “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” returns to the imagery and theology of the Calvinism of Howe’s upbringing, see Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), and Edward D. Snyder, “The Biblical Background of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ ” New England Quarterly 24 (1951): 231–38. 31. For more on the small kulturkampf preceding and following Howe’s review of the concert and Fields’s “Ode,” see Mary Loeffelholz, “The Religion of Art in the City at War: Boston and the Great Organ, 1863,” American Literary History 13 (summer 2001): 212–41. 32. Quoted in Roman, Annie Adams Fields, 77. 33. See Box 1, Folder 1 of the Fields Addenda at the Huntington Library. Some poems in this notebook are recorded as fair copies, others with revisions; in addition, the notebook contains entire pages given over to careful, isolated notations of a poem’s appearance in print—for example, the Atlantic’s printing of her “Andante. Beethoven’s 6th Symphony,” in January 1863. The appearance of this notebook wavers between that of a working composition book and an imagined book’s table of contents; later notebooks are more unambiguously working composition books. 34. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Co., 1875). 35. Nineteenth-century closet verse drama in Britain, especially the high canonical line descending from Percy Shelley through Tennyson, is of course a well-studied field; American nineteenth-century verse drama much less so, in the absence of a native theatrical tradition to “closet.” A scattering of recent books

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and articles suggests that the conjunction between theatricality generally speaking, closet verse drama more specifically, and the rise of lettered women poets in romantic and Victorian Britain is now emerging as a lively topic of investigation. See, for instance, Alan Richardson’s chapter on Mary Shelley’s “Proserpine” in his A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988); Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Catherine B. Borrows, “The English Romantic Closet: Women Theatre Artists, Joanna Baillie, and Basil,” NineteenthCentury Contexts 19 (1995): 125–49; Susan Brown, “Determined Heroines: George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and Closet Drama by Victorian Women,” Victorian Poetry 33 (spring 1995): 89–109; and Denise A. Walen, “Sappho in the Closet,” in Women and Playwrighting in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 36. July 3, 1868. See Roman, Annie Adams Fields, 20. See Comus (“A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle”), ll. 373–84: Virtue could see to do what virtue would By her own radiant light, though Sun and Moon Were in the flat Sea sunk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i’ th’ center, and enjoy bright day, But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the midday Sun; Himself is his own dungeon. In Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press of Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 98–99. Cather’s “148 Charles Street” preserves another vignette of Annie Fields reading Milton aloud—“a very heavy, very old, calf-bound Milton,” opened to the building of Pandemonium: “In courts and palaces he also reigns, And in luxurious cities, where the noise Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers, And injuries and outrage.” See Cather, “148 Charles Street,” 64; the lines are from Paradise Lost, book 1, ll. 497–500. 37. Fields’s notes to The Return of Persephone in Under the Olive, like her notes to other classically based poems in the collection, are copious; for Persephone, she quotes Pater extensively. 38. The Return of Persephone, 1877; repr. in Under the Olive, 143. 39. Sherman, Sarah Orne Jewett, 88. 40. Among other things, The Return of Persephone seems to address the absence of children in Annie and James Fields’s marriage; Demeter’s warmly embodied maternity contrasts with her daughter’s more abstract pastoral care for the shades in Dis’s keeping. Among Annie Fields’s manuscript poems preserved

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at the Huntington Library are her “Canticles of Married Love,” anniversary poems beautifully copied; “Book Second” of the “Canticles,” from the second decade of the marriage, marks the wedding anniversary of 1868 with a poem recording the absent “sound of little feet” in their house, and noting their substitute care for Boston’s orphans (Fields Addenda, Box 2, Folder 2). 41. “The Wanderer,” in the Huntington Library Fields Collection, Fields Addenda, Box 1, Folder 3. This fair copy is dated Manchester [Massachusetts], August 15 [18]74. 42. Annie Fields, The Singing Shepherd and Other Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 53. 43. In the Huntington Library Fields Collection, Fields Addenda, Box 1, Folder 3, a notebook containing poems dated from 1870 to 1880. 44. Francis E. Dolan, “Introduction” to William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, in the Pelican Shakespeare, general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), xl. 45. Given Annie Fields’s friendship with Charlotte Cushman, her wide Anglophile reading habits, and her interest in other women writers, it is tempting to wonder as well whether her interest in The Winter’s Tale and the figure of Perdita may have owed anything to Mary Robinson’s fame as a Shakespearean actress, poetess and translator, and mistress of famous men. Perdita was a particularly famous role for Robinson, and her performance of it in December 1778 before the British royal family led to her entanglement with the Prince of Wales, who sent her love letters addressed from “Florizel” to his “Perdita,” roles that then passed from private correspondence into popular legend. See Mary Robinson, Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by herself (London, 1801), as well as a modern edition, Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson, ed. M. J. Levy (London: Peter Owen, 1994). 46. Among the most familiar nineteenth-century American poems in this genre would be Longfellow’s “The Fire of Drift-Wood,” Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” and Whittier’s “Burning Drift-Wood.” Fields’s manuscript “Perdita” anticipates T. S. Eliot’s “Marina” in its crossing of the American shore poem with Shakespeare’s late romances. 47. See the Fields Addenda, Box 1, Folder 2, in the Huntington Library, for the notebook containing Fields’s earliest versions of “Perdita” as a dramatic monologue. 48. As with the “Ode,” the most scarring response to Asphodel came from a woman whom Annie Fields counted as a friend. On Sophia Hawthorne’s unwittingly hurtful reaction to the copy of Asphodel Fields sent her anonymously, see Roman, Annie Adams Field, 34–36. 49. Mrs. [Annie] Fields, Orpheus: A Masque (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 4. 50. Ovid, Metamorphoses II, Books IX–XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2nd ed. rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). 51. And not only in her poetry; Fields’s prose, especially her extended biographical essays and memorial books, is almost always a tissue of quotations. 52. “Charles River. Boston. 1895,” in the Huntington Library Fields Collection, Fields Addenda, Box 2 (9) A.

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53. Josephine Donovan provides a succinct and, I think, fundamentally just review of Annie Fields’s censoring of the relationship in the collection of Jewett’s letters she edited with M. A. DeWolfe Howe. See Annie Fields, ed., Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), and Donovan, “Unpublished Love Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett,” 26–31.

Conclusion. The Sentiments of Recovery: Adrienne Rich and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Culture 1. For a brief survey of Fields’s relations with institutions of women’s education, see Gollin, Annie Adams Fields, 256–57; on Fields’s service with early advisory boards to both the Harvard “Annex” and Boston University, see Gollin, “Subordinated Power: Mrs. and Mr. James T. Fields,” in Patrons and Proteg´ees: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Marchalonis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 152. 2. Katherine H. Adams, A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880–1940 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), xvi. 3. Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 340. 4. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” in The Buck in the Snow, and Other Poems (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928); for another poet’s contemporary response to the executions, see William Carlos Williams’s “Impromptu: The Suckers” (1927), in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–39, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christoper MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1991), 270–72. 5. Both essays are reprinted in Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Collected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979); “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1968) appeared in The Will to Change (New York: Norton, 1971). 6. Elaine Showalter’s “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 8 (winter 1981): 179–205, summarized this late-1970s development as the move from “feminist critique” (of male-authored images) to “gynocriticism,” centered on women’s active contributions to culture. 7. Shirley Samuels, “Introduction,” in Samuels, Culture of Sentiment, 4. Samuels provides an excellent brief survey of how a “double sense of power and powerlessness continue[s] to inform criticism of the nineteenth-century American project of sentimentality” (3). The canonical early feminist opposing statements over sentimentality are by Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins. Douglas’s hostile reading of sentiment in The Feminization of American Culture was answered in 1981 by Tompkins’s “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History”; revised and reprinted in Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 122–46. The divisions sentiment provokes within feminist criticism have not entirely melted away; they are replicated in the differences, for example, between Marianne Noble’s The Masochistic Pleasures of

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Sentimental Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), an expos´e of nineteenth-century American women’s sentimental tropes of “eroticized domination,” and Mary Louise Kete’s Sentimental Collaborations, which sets out “to excavate the utopian aspects of sentimentality,” including its potential for egalitarian and collaborative relationship (xviii). 8. “Twenty-one Love Poems,” in Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (New York: Norton, 1978). 9. Adrian Oktenberg observes that the language of the sequence as a whole is necessarily “oxymoronic” in its representation of women as simultaneously inside and outside of patriarchy; “ ‘Disloyal to Civilization’: The Twenty-one Love Poems of Adrienne Rich,” in Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-visions, 1951–81, ed. Jane Roberta Cooper (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 75. 10. Samuels, “Introduction,” 5. 11. On these political aims of sentiment, see chapter 3, esp. note 31. 12. The entry “Sentimentality” in the edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics current when Rich began writing the poems of The Dream of a Common Language implies the close relationship between modernist poetics and abjection of sentimentality when it lists among sentimentalism’s defining characteristics “excessively direct poetic expression of pathos without a sufficient poetic correlative” (763). This definition tacitly conjoins several of modernism’s most famous poetic dicta: T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative”; Ezra Pound’s enjoining the “direct presentation of the thing itself”; Williams’s “No ideas but in things.” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enlarged edition, Alex Preminger, ed., Fran K. Warnke and O. B. Hardison Jr., associate eds. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 763. 13. See “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet,” “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman,” and “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” all reprinted in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Rich’s encounter with Emily Dickinson is the most sustained of these early engagements with pre-twentiethcentury women writers; see Betsy Erkkila, “Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickinson, and the Limits of Sisterhood,” in Wicked Sisters, 152–84. 14. Betsy Erkkila also observes the influx of history, and its motives in contemporary feminist politics, in A Wild Patience: “The new sense of historical complexity and complicity, particularity and difference, that enters into Rich’s representation of women in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far is symptomatic of a larger divisiveness in feminism itself as the movement split in the late seventies” (Wicked Sisters, 181). 15. “Heroines,” in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978– 1981 (New York: Norton, 1981), 33–36; notes at 60–61. 16. Marianne Whelchel argues that Rich’s engagement with women’s history in her poetry has changed over time by shifting its focus away from exceptional women of recorded history: “Rich continues in the late sixties and seventies to write about named historical women, [but] in her latest work she has turned more and more to exploring the lives of ‘ordinary’ women past and present.” “ ‘Mining the Earth-Deposits’: Women’s History in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry,” in Cooper, Reading Adrienne Rich, 61. “Heroines,” however, suggests that it

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might be more accurate to see Rich’s work, since the late seventies, as determined to explore the full range of relationships—of power, ignorance, exploitation, collaboration—between “exceptional” and “ordinary” women. 17. For Kete, nineteenth-century poetry—especially elegiac poetry—is an important medium of collaboration in the creation of communal feeling; see her reading of the collaborative mourning album authored by a Vermont woman and her family and friends, “Harriet Gould’s Book,” in Sentimental Collaborations, 19–49. 18. On the Fields-Arnold friendship, see Harris, Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess, 105–7. 19. For an important early essay exploring sentiment’s powers of social control, see Laura Wexler, “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform,” in Samuels, Culture of Sentiment, 9–38. 20. Matthew Arnold, “Preface” to the first edition of Poems (1853), in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 204. 21. John Hollander and Eavan Boland, eds., Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize (New York: Academy of American Poets, 1996). Pinksy’s Favorite Poem Project “invited ordinary Americans to share their favorite poem and their reasons for choosing it”; among those taking up the invitation were a construction worker who read from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” “while perched on a Boston Gas Co. backhoe” and “Rev. Michael Haynes of Roxbury’s 12th Baptist Church,” who recited Longfellow’s “Song of Life” from a graveyard in his native Barbados. See Joseph P. Kahn, “Verse Populi with Its Video Documentaries, the Favorite Poem Project Aims to Show How Works of Art Have Affected Ordinary People,” Boston Globe, April 4, 2000, F1. 22. Lois R. Shea, “The Competition,” Boston Sunday Globe, January 23, 2000, A1. 23. The Globe’s top story for January 23, 2000 was headlined “The Eve of Iowa’s Caucuses: Frenetic Campaigns Share Fear of Complacency.” 24. “One hundred people have turned out to witness the children’s oratory. That’s roughly 10 percent of the population. For Boston to boast a similar showing, 55,500 people would have to show up. Fenway Park could not hold them.” Shea, “The Competition,” A1.

Index

abolitionism, 2–3, 5, 67–68, 83, 97, 100; and ethnology, 75; Africa in, 88; personification in rhetoric of, 89–91; representation of African American women in, 97–99, 236n.6. See also slavery; Reconstruction Adams, Katherine H., 193 aestheticism, 3, 6, 166, 169–73, 178–79, 184–85 African Methodist Episcopal Press, 120 Agassiz, Louis, 75, 232n.25 and 29 Alcott, Louisa May, 4, 162, 222n.21 AME Recorder, 120, 243n.55 Amherst College, 153 Ammons, Elizabeth, 118–19, 242n.50, 254n.3 American Common School Society, 32 American Revolution, 67–70 Anderson, Benedict, 225n.40 Anderson, James, 241n.42 anthologization, of nineteenth-century American poetry, 1–2, 206, 209n.3, 210n.7 Anthony, Susan B., 204 apostrophe, 71, 77, 182–84; in abolitionist rhetoric, 90–91 Armand, Barton Levi St., 154–55, 252n.64 Armstrong, Nancy, 9 Arnold, Matthew, 168, 257n.16; and Annie Fields, 162, 204; in Adrienne Rich’s poetry, 198, 204–5; Culture and Anarchy, 204; “Empedocles on Etna,” 205; Poems (1853), 205 Atlantic Monthly, 137, 150, 222n.21, 243n.54; edited by James T. Fields, 162, 169; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 132, 145, 158; on Josiah Holland’s Kathrina, 143–44, 148, 248n.29, 249n.30 autonomy, aesthetic, 131, 135–36, 193– 94; in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, 154– 55, 157, 160–61; and Annie Fields, 164–65; in Josiah Holland’s Kathrina, 140–41, 144

Barrett, Elizabeth. See Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Baym, Nina, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860, 220n.10, 221n.16; “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” 34–35, 61–62, 213n.17, 219n.6, 220n.11, 221n.15, 222n.19, 228n.29; “Women and the Republic: Emma Willard’s Rhetoric of History,” 16, 212n.13, 216n.38 Bell, James, Madison, 241n.41 Bennett, Michael, 237n.10 and 11 Bennett, Paula Bernat, 1, 209n.2, 210n.3, 251n.59 Bennett, Tony, 3 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 70–71 Bernal, Martin, 231n.18 Bewell, Alan J., 69, 81, 88, 90 Bible: Old Testament, 74, 95, 115; Genesis, 85; Exodus, 98, 104–110, 112–15, 116, 239n.29 and 31; Deuteronomy, 114; New Testament, 95, 104 Bishop, Elizabeth, 7, 192 Blair, Hugh, 71, 74, 230n.11 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, 5, 67 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3, 6, 35, 131, 166; Outline of a Theory of Practice, 154, 167, 257n.16; The Field of Cultural Production, 134–36, 161, 164–65; The Rules of Art, 1, 8, 147, 148, 193–94, 196, 201; and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, 48 bourgeois art, 135–36, 144, 150, 161 Boyd, Melba Joyce, 240n.35 and 36 Bradstreet, Anne, 202 Bramen, Carrie, 125–26 Brodhead, Richard, 4, 15–18, 119–20, 212n.10, 222n.21, 256n.16; on Annie Fields’s salon, 162–63, 254n.3 Bront¨e, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 136, 202 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 192 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 67, 132, 194, 204; and Josiah Holland, 136–145, 150; compared to Helen Hunt Jackson,

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Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (cont.) 250n.44, 251n.53; Aurora Leigh, 136– 39, 141–45, 247n.19, 248n.24, 25, and 26, 249n.30 Bryant, William Cullen, 122 Bryn Mawr College, 7 Buell, Lawrence, 234n.39 Butler, Judith, 235n.51 canon formation, in American literature, 6, 9, 166–67, 193, 242n.47 and 48, 256n.16. See also literary studies; Modern Language Association Cary, Alice, 149; “Abraham Lincoln,” 240n.40 Cather, Willa, 162, 261n.36 Chapman, Maria Weston, 67–68, 229n.2 Child, Lydia Maria, 134, 233n.30, 234n.43; Evenings in New England, 71–74, 76–77, 90, 230n.13 child prodigy, as poet, 4, 20, 23–25, 28 Civil War, American, 5, 67, 144, 145, 174, 236n.4; in writings of Frances Harper, 94, 96–100; in Annie Fields’s “Ode,” 172–73. See also Reconstruction Civil War, English, 55, 59 Clark, Suzanne, 7 classical literary curriculum, and the common school, 55; in Greenfield Hill (Dwight), 53–55, 57, 226n.42; in higher education, 9, 227n.45 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 70, 149; “Hymn to Mount Blanc,” 30; “Kubla Khan,” 25–26, 28, 216n.39 Cott, Nancy, 250n.43 Coultrap-McQuin, Susan, 246n.9 Crain, Patricia, 8, 151–52, 214n.19 Crumbley, Paul, 253n.70 cultural capital, 5, 6, 8–9, 124, 159; and education, 152; nineteenth-century women’s writing as, 196 cultural field, 3, 35; Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson in, 135–36, 154– 155, 161 cultural hierarchy, 3, 4, 249n.32; and Frances Harper, 119–20, 155, 243n.54 and 55; in Josiah Holland’s Kathrina, 139, 143–44, 146; see also high culture Curie, Marie, 200–201

Cushman, Charlotte, 147, 258n.22, 262n.45; and Annie Fields’s “Ode,” 168–70; and Julia Ward Howe, 259n.27 Dall, Caroline, 87, 229n.2 Dante, 185–86 Davidson, Lucretia Maria, 4–5, 13–31, 33, 35–36, 152–53, 203, 165–66; 211n.2, 213n.15; as child prodigy, 20, 23–25, 214n.23, 215n.36; at the Troy Female Seminary, 16, 20–22, 25, 214n.27; Poe’s view of, 13–15, 24–25, 31; in nineteenth-century elocution, 29– 31, 121, 124–25; in twentieth-century criticism, 17–18. Works: “Amir Khan,” 5, 17, 24–29, 30, 176, 216n.39, 217n.42, 218n.43; “Auction Extraordinary,” 218n.44; “Lines, Written under the Promise of Reward,” 24; “Sabrina,” 217n.42; “To My Mother,” 30 Davidson, Margaret Miller, 13–16, 18– 19, 22–23, 37, 216n.36; in nineteenthcentury elocution, 29–31, 121, 124–25; “To My Sister Lucretia,” 31 Davidson, Margaret M. (mother of Lucretia and Margaret Miller), 13, 14, 18–19, 22, 23–24, 215n.29 Dayan, Joan, 15, 211n.5 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 134; “Life in the Iron Mills,” 133 de Man, Paul, 82, 84, 90–91, 235n.47 Denon, Vivant, 231n.19 Dickinson, Emily, 2, 6–7, 131–161; as elegist, 34; and education, 153–54; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 132, 145–47, 158; and Josiah Holland, 132, 145; at Mount Holyoke, 7, 192; Adrienne Rich and, 202; and social art, 133–35, 144, 194; in twentieth-century criticism, 133–35, 155, 160; writing practices, 131, 155–56, 216n.36, 252n.65. Works: “I bring an unaccustomed wine” (Fr 126), 250n.37; “The luxury to apprehend” (Fr 819), 145–46, 147; “Oh the Earth was made for lovers” (Fr 1), 218n.44; “She dealt her pretty words like blades” (Fr 458), 153; “The spider as an artist” (Fr 1373), 253n.63; “The spider holds a silver ball” (Fr 513), 154–57; “Dare you

Index see a soul at the
White Heat’” (Fr 401C), 158–61, 167, 253n.67, 69, and 70 didacticism, 3–4, 6, 178; Dickinson’s refusal of, 154–60; Helen Hunt Jackson’s refusal of, 156–57, 159–60 disciplinary intimacy, 15–19, 24, 31, 120. See also domestic-tutelary complex disinterestedness, 193; and Annie Fields, 168, 176, 184, 188; in Josiah Holland’s Kathrina, 141, 144; and Helen Hunt Jackson, 148 Dix, Dorothy, 124, 224n.61 Dobson, Joanne, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence, 133–34, 151, 155, 157, 160, 246n.10, 247n.14; “Sex, Wit, and Sentiment: Frances Osgood and the Poetry of Love,” 213n.17 domestic-tutelary complex, 4, 6, 67, 194; and the Davidson sisters, 15–16, 25; and Sigourney, 32–33, 36, 42, 48. See also disciplinary intimacy Donovan, Josephine, 168, 263n.53 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 7, 151, 192 Douglas, Ann, 212n.12, 263n.7 Douglass, Frederick, 100, 121, 134; Narrative, 239n.26 Dowling, William, 52, 57, 225n.38, 228n.51, 52 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 121–22; Lyrics of Lowly Life, 122 Dwight, Timothy, 225n.38, 226n.43, 227n.46; Greenfield Hill, 5, 52–61, 225n.38, 39, 226n. 41, 42, and 44, 227n.46, 228n.49, 51, 52, and 54; as President of Yale College, 54, 226n.42, 227n.44, 45 education, nineteenth-century women’s, 4– 5; public elementary, 224n.36, and Lucretia Davidson, 19–22, 25, 29–31; and Lydia Sigourney, 32–33, 36–45, 227n.46. See also higher education, women’s Edwards, Jonathan, 154 Egypt, ancient, 86; in Frances Harper’s Moses, 104–15; in Maria Lowell’s “Africa,” 80–91; Napoleon’s expedition to, 74, 80, 231n.19; and ideas of race in the United States, 75–76, 91–93, 121– 22, 232n.23 and 27, 235n.46; and slavery, 232n.21

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elegy, 33–36, 41–45, 220n.11, 223n.36 Eliot, George, 251n.58 Eliot, T. S., 257n.16, 264n.12; “Marina,” 262n.46 Ellison, Julie, 228n.52 elocution, 6, 41, 244n.59; and African American performance, 121–27; Davidson sisters in, 29–31, 121, 124–25; professionalization of, 121–27, 207, 244n.62 and 65, 245n.66 and 67; and Lydia Sigourney, 29, 36; and whiteness, 121, 124–27 Emancipation Proclamation, 116 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 69, 72–74, 169, 187–88; on Helen Hunt Jackson, 149. Works: Journal, 72–74; “Monadnoc,” 70–71, 234n.40; Nature, 81–82, 85; Poems (1847), 69, 70, 234n.38; “Shakespeare,” 154; “The Sphinx,” 69, 80–84, 86–91, 234n.38, 39, and 40 epic, and Frances Harper’s Moses, 105–6, 113, 115, 239n.28; and Lydia Sigourney, 57–59 Erkkila, Betsy, 134, 155, 160, 264n.13 and 14 ethnology, 75–76, 232n.25; and Maria Lowell’s “Africa,” 84, 88 Faxon, Grace B., “Three Women Poets of New England,” 149–50 Fetterley, Judith, 17, 212n.12, 213n.16, 17, 219n.50 Fields, Annie, 6–7, 162–91, 204; and classical literature, 167, 176–77, 184– 88; and high culture, 162–63, 164, 178, 183–84; and education, 7, 9, 163, 165–68, 176, 178–79, 184, 188, 192, 256n.15, 257n.17; marriage of to James T. Fields, 162, 179, 249n.32, 261n.40; and pastoral masque, 175–76, 181–82; relationship to Sarah Orne Jewett, 162, 168, 179, 191, 254n.3, 258n.22, 263n.53; philanthropic work of, 163– 64, 188, 255n.7 and 8; salon of, 162– 63, 175, 168, 170, 176, 188, 192, 254n.2; on women writers, 6, 164–65, 168, 179, 188. Works: “Andante: Beethoven’s 6th Symphony,” 260n.33; Asphodel, 174, 184, 262n.48; “At the Forge,” 167; “Canticles of Married Love,” 262n.40; “The Contributors and the Children,” 257n.17; “The Employ-

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Fields, Annie (cont.) ment, Education, and Protection of Women,” 163, 255n.7; How to Help the Poor, 255n.7 and 8; Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, 263n.53; “Ode: Recited by Miss Charlotte Cushman, at the Inauguration of the Great Organ in Boston,” 168–74, 176, 184, 207, 258n.23 and 25, 259n.27, 260n.31; Orpheus: A Masque, 168, 175, 184–89; Pandora, 175, 257n.18; “Perdita,” 179–84, 188, 262n.46; The Return of Persephone, 168, 175, 176–80, 182, 184, 188, 257n.18, 261n.40; “The River Charles,” 189–91, 192; The Singing Shepherd, 180, 189; “Stranded,” 182; “Tennyson,” 165–67; Under the Olive, 167, 175, 257n.18; “The Wanderer,” 179–80, 183 Fields, James T., 6, 162, 168; as editor of Atlantic Monthly, 162, 169, 259n.27 Finch, Annie, 34, 213n.17, 220n.8 Fisher, Philip, 77 Follen, Elizabeth, 68, 229n.2 Forten, Charlotte, 243n.54 Foster, Frances Smith, Written by Herself: Literary Production by AfricanAmerican Women, 1746–1892, 5, 105, 106–7, 110–11, 112, 115–16, 236n.1, 240n.33 and 39, 241n.43 and 44; “Gender, Genre, and Vulgar Secularism: The Case of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the AME Press,” 119–20, 210n.7, 243n.56 Foucault, Michel, 18 Franchot, Jenny, 230n.4 Franklin, R. W., 249n.34, 251n.57, 252n.65 Frost, Robert, “Directive,” 200 Fuller, Margaret, 69, 134, 194; on the great Sphinx, 87 Gelpi, Albert J., 251n.59 geography, as school subject, 25–26 Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, 7, 218n.45, 252n.64 Gliddon, George, 78, 232n. 21 and 29; and Josiah C. Nott, Types of Mankind, 79, 232n.27, 235n.46 Goldsmith, Oliver, “The Deserted Village,” 5, 52–53, 56, 60–61, 225n.39, 228n.48

Gollin, Rita K., 258n.24, 263n.1 Gould, Stephen Jay, 232n.25 Graham, Maryemma, 104 Grant, Mary H., 259n.27 Gray, Thomas, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 5, 52, 55–57, 59–61, 212n.12, 228n.49 Green, Laura Morgan, 251n.58 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 209n.3 Guillory, John, 56, 144, 212n.12, 228n.49, 241n.43, 247n.15, 257n.16 Guiney, Imogen, 162 Habegger, Albert, 245n.3, 247n.19, 249n.36 Haight, Gordon, 219n.4, 220n.7, 221n.13, 15, and 17, 223n.28 Hall, Donald, 207 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 5–6, 67, 94–127, 153, 194, 208, 209n3., 210n.7, 244n.58; and abolitionism, 97– 98, 100; and the Civil War, 236n.4, 239n.27; in American literary canon, 119, 121–22, 126–27, 243n.56; and cultural hierarchy, 119–20, 155, 243n.54 and 55; on education, 101–2, 117–18; and elocution, 121–27; as lecturer, 94–103, 236n.1; and sentimentalism, 97. Works: “An Appeal to the American People,” 99–100, 102; Atlanta Offering, 236n.2, 238n.21; “Aunt Chloe,” 115, 239n.23, 240n.39, 241n.44; “The Building,” 238n.21; “The Burial of Moses,” 114; “Bury Me in a Free Land,” 114; “Church Building,” “The Deliverance,” 115–17; “The Dying Bondman,” 122; Iola Leroy, 119, 236n.4, 238n.19, 239n.27, 241n.43, 242n.50; “The Jewish Grandfather’s Story,” 239n.23; “Learning to Read,” 117; “Lines to Charles Sumner,” 237n.14; “The Little Builders,” 101–4, 105, 114, 120, 238n.17, 19, and 21; “The Mission of the Flowers,” 236n.7; Moses: A Story of the Nile, 6, 104–18, 176, 236n.7, 239n.23 and 27, 240n.37, 241n.43; Poems (1871), 94, 99, 238n.21; “The Reunion,” 115–16; Sowing and Reaping, 241n.43; Sketches of Southern Life, 6, 104–5, 118, 239n.23, 241n.43; Trial and Triumph, 241n.43,

Index 243n.55; “Truth,” 94–100, 102, 104, 109, 112, 236n.2 and 7, 238n.21; “Woman’s Political Future,” 237n.17 Harper, Mary E. (daughter of Frances Harper), 121 Harrington, Joseph, 2, 209n.3 Harris, Sharon, 209n.3 Harris, Susan K., 17, 255n.7, 257n.19, 265n.18 Hart, Ellen Louise, 210n.3 Harvard University, 7, 9 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 70, 121; and Annie Fields, 169; The Scarlet Letter, 170, 212n.10 Hawthorne, Sophia, 262n.48 H.D. See Doolittle, Hilda Hegel, Georg W. F., 73, 77, 85–86; Aesthetics, Egypt in, 74–75, 81, 87–88, 91 Hemans, Felicia, 29, 36, 221n.17 hieroglyphics, Egyptian, 74, 76, 81 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth: Emily Dickinson and, 132, 145–47, 158; on education, 152–53; Helen Hunt Jackson and, 132, 146–47, 149–51, 152; “The Murder of the Innocents,” 152; “A Plea for Culture,” 145–47, 153 high culture, 3–4, 6, 222n.21; Annie Fields and, 162–63, 164, 178, 183–84. See also cultural hierarchy History of Woman Suffrage, 204–5 higher education, women’s, 7, 9, 153, 163, 192–93 Holland, Elizabeth, 132, 135, 249n.36 Holland, Josiah, 6, 120, 135–48, 248n.23; Emily Dickinson and, 132, 145–46, 249n.33 and 36; editor of Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, 132, 142; education of, 137, 144, 248n.29; Helen Hunt Jackson and, 132, 148; BitterSweet, 249n.33; Kathrina, 135–148, 150, 157, 158, 248n.24, 27, and 29, 249n.32, 250n.37 and 42; “Women and Literature,” 136–37, 139, 143, 146, 247n.19 Hollander, John, 1, 206 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 169; “The Chambered Nautilus,” 5, 102–3 Homans, Margaret, 220n.8, 248n.27 Howe, Julia Ward, 169; review of Annie Fields’s “Ode,” 173–74, 259n.28, 260n.29 and 31; “Battle Hymn of the

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Republic,” 98, 173–74, 259n.27, 260n.30; Reminiscences, 259n.27, 260n.29; Words for the Hour, 173 Howe, Susan, 253n.65 Howells, William Dean, 164 Huyssen, Andreas, 248n.21 Hymn to Demeter (Homer), 176–77 Irving, Washington, 13, 14; “Biography of Miss Margaret Davidson,” 18–19, 22, 30, 37 Irwin, John, 76 Islam, nineteenth-century American representations of, 26, 28 Jackson, Cassandra, 238n.19 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 6, 121, 131–61, 246n.7 and 8; and cultural hierarchy, 120, 135, 150; and education, 152–54, 251n.55 and 57; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 132, 146–47, 149– 51, 152, 250n.44 and 45; professionalism of, 133, 135, 150, 246n.9; nineteenth-century reception of, 132, 148–52, 251n.53; and social art, 133, 135, 157; in twentieth-century criticism, 133–35, 151. Works: “Ariadne’s Farewell,” 250n.45, 251n.53; “Children in Nova Scotia,” 251n.55; “Crossed Threads,” 156–57; “Form,” 250n.42; “Gondolieds,” 251n.54; “The Magic Armory,” 253n.69; “No Man’s Land,” 147–49, 152, 157; “The Poet’s Forge,” 158–61, 167, 253n.69; Ramona, 133, 135, 194; “The Reign of Archelaus,” 152; “The Riveria,” 251n.54; “The Teacher,” 253n.69; “Thought,” 250n.45; “Triumph,” 253n.69; Verses (1870), 132, 150, 151, 250n.45; “When the Baby Died,” 250n.45 Jackson, Virginia, 233n.34 Jacobs, Harriet, 96, 134 James, Henry, 162 James, William, 126 Jewett, Sarah Orne, relationship to Annie Fields, 162, 168, 179, 191, 254n.3, 258n.22, 263n.53; Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (ed. Annie Fields), 263n.53 Johnson, Andrew, 116–17, 241n.41 Johnson, Barbara, 90–91 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 192

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Index Greg, 251n.59 Nan, 244n.59 Thomas H., 145, 249n.34 Wendy Dasler, 77

Karcher, Carolyn, 231n.13 Keats, John, 69–70; Hyperion, 69, 80–81, 85, 88–89, 234n.36; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 156 Kete, Mary Louise, 204, 209n.3, 229n.56, 264n.7, 265n.17 Kilcup, Karen, 221n.13 Lacan, Jacques, 179 Larcom, Lucy, 121, 149; and Annie Fields, 162, 257n.18; An Idyl of Work, 144, 249n.32 Lauter, Paul, 118–19, 210n.7, 242n.44 Lawson-Peebles, Robert, 225n.39 Leach, Joseph, 258n.22 and 24, 259n.27 Lerner, Gerda, 203 lesbianism, 196–98, 257n.21 Levander, Caroline Field, 224n.29 Levine, Lawrence, 4 The Liberty Bell, 5, 67–69, 90, 229n.2 and 3, 232n.21 Lincoln, Abraham, 116, 240n.37 and 40 literacies, 5–6, 8; and Emily Dickinson, 155; and Annie Fields, 165–67; and Frances Harper, 105, 117–18 literary studies, professionalization of, 118–20, 242n.47; and elocution, 120– 27. See also canon formation; Modern Language Association Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 209n.3; “The Fire of Drift-Wood,” 262n.46; Hiawatha, 203; The Masque of Pandora, 175; “Psalm of Life,” 206, 265n.21; “The Village Blacksmith,” 158–61, 167 Looby, Christopher, 225n.40 Lootens, Tricia, 228n.53 Lott, Eric, 244n.61 Lowell, James Russell, 69, 75; “The Burial of Theobald,” 68 Lowell, Maria, 5, 67–93, 98–99, 194; “Africa,” 5, 67–69, 71, 75, 80–91, 94, 98–99, 229n.2, 235n.43 Martineau, Harriet, 67, 229n.2 Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 73, 77, 233n.34

masque, pastoral, 175–76, 181–82, 217n.43 Melville, Herman, 134; Pierre, 71 Merrill, James, 246n.4 middlebrow culture, 6, 120, 136–37, 144 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 192; “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” 193–94 Milton, John, 104, 119, 180, 218n.45; Comus, 25, 27, 176, 217n.42 and 43, 261n.36; Paradise Lost, 25–26, 28, 96, 218n.43, 261n.36 Mitchell, Domhnall, 131–33, 135, 155, 160, 245n.3, 246n.11, 252n.62, 253n.65 Modern Language Association of America, 6, 118, 120, 125–26, 244n.62 modernism, 7, 119, 192–93; and Emily Dickinson, 131–32; and Helen Hunt Jackson, 150–51; and sentimentalism, 201 Moore, Marianne, 7, 192 Morris, Timothy, 245n.3 Morton, Samuel George, 76 Mount Holyoke Seminary, 153, 192 Murray, A´ıfe, 155, 252n.62 nationalism, 51–61, 225n.40 Nelson, Dana, 209n.3 New Criticism, 2–3, 257n.16 Noble, Marianne, 263n.7 novel, and bourgeois culture, 15–16, 212n.12 Oktenberg, Adrian, 264n.9 orientalism, 5, 25–29 Osgood, Frances, 213n.17 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 184–85 Pater, Walter, 176, 261n.37 personification, 67, 71–74, 230n.11 and 13; and race, 76–80, 83; in Harper’s poetry, 94, 98–99, 102; in Maria Lowell’s “Africa,” 80, 82–86, 89–91 Peterson, Carla, “Doers of the Word,” 97, 100, 104; “Frances Harper, Charlotte Forten, and African American Literary Reconstruction,” 119–20, 243n.54 Petrino, Elizabeth, 34, 151, 209n.2 Pinsky, Robert, 206, 265n.21 Poe, Edgar Allan, 31, 211n.5, 212n.10, 221n.17; on Lucretia and Margaret

Index Miller Davidson, 13–15, 19, 24–25; “Ligeia,” 14–15 Pollak, Vivian, 247n.16 polygeny, 75–76, 88, 232n.25, 233n.30. See also ethnology Poovey, Mary, 7–8, 144 Pound, Ezra, 264n.12 Power, Julia, 230n.6 pragmatism, 126, 141 prosopopoeia. See personification prospect poem, 50 Radcliffe College, 7, 192, 195 recitation, in pedagogy, 21–22, 29–31, 37, 165–66, 168, 206–8 Reconstruction, 5, 67, 94–118, 241n.42. See also Civil War, American recovery projects, 1–2, 7–9; 144, 208; privileging of fiction in, 17–18, 134, 212n.12; Adrienne Rich and, 195–96, 200, 202 republican motherhood, 16, 34, 36, 194 revolutions of 1848, 70, 90 Reynolds, David S., 247n.14 Reynolds, Larry J., 230n.7 Rich, Adrienne, 7, 195–208; and Matthew Arnold, 198, 204–5; and Emily Dickinson, 264n.13; and feminist scholarship, 195–96, 202–6; and higher education, 195; and lesbianism, 196–98; and sentimentalism, 195–97, 200–201, 204–6. Works: “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” 195; “Cartographies of Silence,” 202; “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” 257n.21; “Culture and Anarchy,” 204– 6; The Dream of a Common Language, 7, 195, 196–202, 204; “For Memory,” 202; “Heroines,” 203; “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman,” 202; “Orion,” 202; “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff,” 199–200; “Phantasia for Elvira Shateyev,” 199; “Planetarium,” 202; “Power,” 199–202; “Teaching Language in Open Admissions,” 195; “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet,” 202; “Toward a WomanCentered University,” 195; “Transcendental Etude,” 202; “Twenty-one Love Poems,” 197–99; “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” 202; A

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Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, 7, 195, 201–6, 264n.14 Richards, Eliza, 209n.2, 212n.5, 222n.17 Riding, Laura, 192 Robbins, Sarah, 222n.18 Robinson, Mary, 262n.45 Roman, Judith A., 174, 255n.5, 256n.15, 262n.48 romantic titanism, 69–71, 73, 80–82, 98, 234n.40 romanticism, British, 5, 25, 69–71, 80–81 Rubin, Gayle, 240n.32 Ruskin, John, 251n.57 Samuels, Shirley, 230n.11, 240n.37; The Culture of Sentiment, 196, 200, 212n.12, 231n13, 263n.7 Sanchez-Eppler, ´ Karen, 2–3, 67–69, 236n.6 Savage, Kirk, 233n.35, 237n.13, 240n.40 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 33, 203 Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, 120, 243n.54; and Helen Hunt Jackson, 132, 147–48, 150, 151–53 Scudder, Horace, “American Classics in School,” 167 Sedgwick, Catherine M., on Lucretia Davidson, 13–16, 20–24, 29–31 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 258n.22; “A Poem Is Being Written,” 23–25, 217n.42 sentimentalism, 16, 34, 263n.7; and Frances Harper, 97; in Maria Lowell’s “Africa,” 87–89; and modernism, 201, 264n.12; and personification, 77–80; and Adrienne Rich, 195–97, 200–201, 204–6; and Lydia Sigourney, 221n.11 Sewall, Richard, 246n.7, 248n.29, 251n.57 Shakespeare, William, 121; Romeo and Juliet, 28; The Winter’s Tale, 181–83, 188, 262n.45 Shelley, Mary, 69; Mathilda, 218.43 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 69–70, 80, 234n.40; “Ode to the West Wind,” 90; “Ozymandias,” 69, 80, 94, 98; “Prometheus Unbound,” 69; The Triumph of Life, 69, 82, 84, 234n.36 Sherman, Jane, 1 Sherman, Sarah, 254n.3 Showalter, Elaine, 196, 263n.6

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Sigourney, Lydia, 4–5, 29, 32–64, 153, 157, 165, 209n.3, 221n.17, 223n.26; and classical education, 227n.46; and elegy, 33–36, 41–45, 220n.11, 223n.26; and epic, 57–59; marriage of, 37, 63, 223n.28; view of Native Americans, 59–61, 228n.53; professionalism of, 33, 63, 220n.7, 221n.13; as schoolteacher, 32–33, 36–45; and sentimentalism, 221.n11; and slavery, 226n.41; in twentieth-century criticism, 33–35, 220n.8. Works: “Africa,” 234n.43; “Ark and Dove,” 46, 49; The Boy’s Reading-book, 32, 48–49; “Connecticut River,” 5, 51–61, 64, 152, 225n.39, 226n.41, 227n.46; “Exhibition of a School of Young Ladies,” 46, 49; The Girl’s Reading-book, 32–33, 46–51, 55, 224n.30 and 36; Illustrated Poems (1849), 33, 39, 51, 220n.7, 223n.24; “The Insect Teacher,” 154–55; Letters of Life, 32, 34, 36–38, 41, 62, 220n.7, 222n. 20 and 22, 223n.23 and 24; Letters to My Pupils, 32, 37, 45, 48, 223n.23 and 25; Letters to Young Ladies, 36; Lucy Howard’s Journal, 32, 62–64, 229n.56; Moral Pieces, in Prose and Verse, 32, 46, 49, 219n.6; “On Meeting Pupils at the Communion Table,” 47, 49; Pocahontas, and Other Poems, 33, 40, 49, 223n.24; Poems (1827), 33, 40, 49; Poems (1834), 33, 49; “Sabrina,” 217n.42; “Scholar’s Tribute to an Instructor,” 46–47; Sketch of Connecticut, 222n.19; “Teacher’s Excuse,” 46, 49; Traits of the Aborigines of America, 40, 194, 203, 219n.6, 223n.24; “The Village,” 49–51, 208; Zinzendorff, and Other Poems, 40, 223n.24 slave narratives, 106 slavery, in ancient Egypt, 86, 104–14; and ethnology, 75; in Frances Harper’s poetry, 94–117, 240n.40; in Maria Lowell’s “Africa,” 89–90; and Lydia Sigourney, 226n.41. See also abolition; Reconstruction Smith, Martha Nell, 210n.3, 253n.65 social art, 134–35, 161; in Josiah Holland’s Kathrina, 140, 144 Sorisio, Carolyn, 209n.3, 237n.11

Southey, Robert, 13; “The Curse of Kehama,” 25–26; on Lucretia Davidson, 19–20, 24 Sphinx, the Great, 92–93, 94, 99, 121– 22, 124, 126, 235n.49 and 51; in Hegel’s Aesthetics, 74, 87–88, 91; in Maria Lowell’s “Africa,” 80–84, 87–91 Spillers, Hortense, 108, 239n.30 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, The Woman’s Bible, 239n.31 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 248n.29 Stein, Gertrude, 192 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 6, 134, 237n.8; Annie Fields on, 164–65; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 133, 240n.39 Sussman, Henry, 73 Taggard, Genevieve, 193 Taylor, Edward, 154 Taylor, Orville, 224n.36 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 70, 121; and Annie Fields, 164, 165–67; “The Lady of Shalott,” 165, 167, 178; The Princess, 137, 248n.24 Thaxter, Celia, 121, 149, 162, 164 Thoreau, Henry David, 134 Tompkins, Jane, 34, 221n.11, 263n.7 Toohey, Michelle Campbell, 241n.43 Troy Female Seminary, 16, 20–22, 25, 29. See also Willard, Emma Truth, Sojourner, 96, 237n.8 Tubman, Harriet, 113, 240n.37 Vassar College, 7, 192; classical curriculum of, 163 verse drama, 260n.35. See also masque, pastoral Walker, Cheryl, 215n.33; American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century, 1, 17, 23, 25, 213n.15 and 17; The Nightingale’s Burden, 13, 34, 209n.2, 215n.29, 220n.11 Wang, Orrin, 82, 89 Warner, Charles Dudley, “The Novel and the Common School,” 256n.16 Watkins, William (nephew of Frances Harper), 100–101, 238n.17 Watts, Emily, 209n.2 Wellesley College, 163 Werner’s Magazine, 121–26, 149

Index Wexler, Laura, 77, 265n.19 Whelchel, Marianne, 264n.16 Whitaker, Thomas, 234n.39 Whitman, Walt, 2, 134; “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” 262n.46; “Song of Myself,” 265n.21; “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” 241n.40 Whitman, Sarah, 162 Whittier, John Greenleaf, “Burning DriftWood,” 262n.46, The Tent on the Beach, 144, 249n.32 Willard, Emma, 16, 20–21, 25–26, 29, 214n.27; “Prophetic Strains,” 216n.40; Universal Geography, 26, 217n.40 and 42. See also Troy Female Seminary Williams, Raymond, 131, 228n.48 Williams, William Carlos, 263n.4, 264n.12

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Wordsworth, William, 70, 150, 167, 169, 234n.40; compared to Lydia Sigourney, 220n.8, 223n.27; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 30, 166, 171; The Prelude, 138, 143, 144 Yale College, 54, 55, 225n.38, 226n.42, 227n.44 and 45 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 236n.6, 237n.8 Young, Elizabeth, 236n.4, 237n.16, 239n.27 The Young Ladies’ Elocutionary Reader, 29–31 Zagarell, Sandra, 222n.19 Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary Saracino Zboray, 229n.3