Fantasies of “Woman”: Hemans's Deconstruction of “Femininity” in Records of Woman

Abstract

This essay counters the abiding view of Hemans's gender essentialism by examining its two principal sources: first, the critical conflation of Hemans's personal and poetic voices, which takes Hemans's third-person narrator, female characters, lyric speaker and dramatized voices to be variations of Hemans's self; second, Hemans's repetition of images of domestic femininity throughout her poetry, which, for some critics, essentializes “woman” as a universal essence. The author argues instead that Hemans challenges both the conflation of poet and persona and the essentialist view of “woman” through this very repetition of voices and images. Through her construction of narrative, lyric and dramatized voices in Records of Woman (1828), the collection that established her reputation as the “poet of womanhood”, Hemans deconstructs the illusion of a gender essence and dramatizes the ways in which that illusion is performatively produced.