Mimicry, Originality, and Sarah Piatt’s Ekphrastic Failures

Abstract

Mimicry, Originality, and Sarah Piatt’s Ekphrastic Failures Christa Holm Vogelius (bio) Sarah Piatt might seem a strange case study for originality and mimicry in nineteenth-century women’s verse, given her own strained relation to poetic convention. Her layered dialogue, distancing irony, and sharp, often cutting turns produce an effect askew of polished gentility. There are children here, but they are not innocent; there is romance, but it often ends badly; there are paintings and beautiful things, but the sense they leave us is more somber depth than reflective surface. Nonetheless, it is precisely Piatt’s engagement with and resistance to convention that make her poetry worth thinking about through these terms. This essay considers Piatt’s use of mirroring images and mimicry to test the boundaries between original and copy. This testing leads organically to Piatt’s ekphrastic verse, which as a detailed verbal description of a visual artwork is both in its basic function a literal copy and one that also deals very explicitly with the imitative function of images as behavioral models. If the nineteenth-century woman poet was on the one hand associated with a transparent, artless sentimentality and a seamless embodiment of her own verse, and on the other with imitation and a failure to truly originate, Piatt’s poems, particularly her ekphrases, [End Page 300] present an escape hatch from the traditional Poetess mode. These poems work within and unsettle a tradition in which, as Yopie Prins explains, the Poetess was a “detachable figure that exceeded the work of any actual woman poet,” “a repeatable trope, a personification performed by female poets.”1 Piatt’s poems engage sentimentality, but they do so through irony’s distancing lens, complicating the notion of poetic embodiment—by, in Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s terms, “mak[ing] evident the fragmented nature of lyric utterance … [and] lay[ing] bare the contradictory connection between embodiment and representation.”2 At the same time, the obvious attention to craft evident in Piatt’s poems denies the role of the Poetess as an astute mimic of form. What develops from this engagement and resistance are poems whose layering of voices elude a particular conceptual center and copies that perpetuate with no clear original, in a nineteenth century version of hyperreality that slips past the basic ethics of poetic embodiment. Piatt’s verse, in other words, may seem to us innovative in its anticipation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century modes of thought and writing, but it achieves this effect through its direct engagement with nineteenth-century Poetess tropes. The gift that Piatt gives us, then—and Paula Bernat Bennett through her—is the ability to see this mode as not (just) a harbinger of modernity or postmodernity, but as a state of mind that was already deeply embedded in nineteenth-century conventions, already a part of the way that writers and critics talked with and about this poetry. This essay begins by discussing the vocabulary of nineteenth-century editorial writing in relation to both feminist theory and our contemporary critical conversations. The second section frames Piatt’s verse of mirroring imagery in this context, while the final section, on Piatt’s ekphrases and ekphrastic theory, argues that this work is emblematic of her poetics as well as representative of the contradictory demands on the nineteenth-century woman writer. [End Page 301] i: the terms of criticism: origination, mirroring, and mimicry In the preface to the first edition of The Female Poets of America (1848), editor Rufus Griswold opens with an assertion that to his contemporary readers must have seemed a platitude: “It is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men.”3 Women’s verse, particularly the genteel newspaper and periodical verse that Griswold strove to consolidate, had a lot to prove in these early years of nationalist literary collection. Anthologies like Griswold’s attempted to define, however unsystematically, what should count as American literature at a point when writers and editors were pushing back against European models. And “genuineness of literary ability” often hinged on tenuous and subjective terms like originality at a time when women’s writing was undeniably dominated by both...