Response: Women's Poetry, Women's Vision, Women's Power

Abstract

Response:Women's Poetry, Women's Vision, Women's Power Meredith Martin (bio) On 27 September 2018, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, and recounted a moment from her teenage years: "early in the evening, I went up a very narrow set of stairs. … When I got to the top of the stairs, I was pushed from behind into a bedroom across from the bathroom. I couldn't see who pushed me. Brett and Mark came into the bedroom and locked the door behind them" (Ford n. p.). Throughout NAVSA 2018, everything I heard was shot through with the vivid memory of her testimony. As haunting as it remains, the most terrifying aspect of the hearing, for me, was what came after: Brett Kavanaugh's display of entitlement, of being denied what he perceived to be his right. I was reminded of the toxic masculinity of Christina Rossetti's frustrated goblins: They began to scratch their pates,No longer wagging, purring,But visibly demurring,Grunting and snarling.One call'd her proud,Cross-grain'd, uncivil;Their tones wax'd loud,Their looks were evil.Lashing their tailsThey trod and hustled her, [End Page 216] Elbow'd and jostled her,Claw'd with their nails,Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,Tore her gown and soil'd her stockingTwitch'd her hair out by the roots,Stamp'd upon her tender feet,Held her hands and squeez'd their fruitsAgainst her mouth to make her eat. ("Goblin Market" 390-407) Papers across this year's NAVSA conference reoriented me toward what women, in particular, see when they look outward, even when someone might be holding a hand over their mouths. How are feminist scholars today rethinking the ways that nineteenth-century women configure power? In several papers I heard, scholars moved from the more predictable question of how women were seen to how—and what—women themselves see. Bolstered perhaps by Linda K. Hughes's tremendous shepherding of the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry into the world, the focus of scholarship on Victorian poetry at this NAVSA powerfully turned away from the usual suspects of Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold. In papers such as Krista Lysack's "Emily Brontё's Wind Power," Melissa Gregory's paper on Frances Watkins Harper, "Slavery and The Ballad," and Tricia Lootens's paper on abolition time in Toru Dutt, "Looking Beyond (and Before) Ancient Ballads," as well as the several papers thinking about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and new modes of reading, women's poetry and women's power was a not-so-subtle sub-theme of the conference for the Victorian Poetry crowd. That crowd, too, became an even warmer community thanks to the efforts of Amy Kahrmann Huseby, whose work this past year organizing the Victorian Poetry Caucus was warmly appreciated and applauded by the large inaugural gathering of the caucus itself. The preceding papers by Caolan Madden, Ashley Miller, and Heather Bozant Witcher deepen our engagement both with poems we think we might not know how to read (Rossetti's "The Prince's Progress" [1866]) and with poems that have taught us how to read poetry (Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh [1856]). Each paper moves our critical perspective away from its expected location, looks outward toward different horizons, and, in doing so, changes how we think of power—and the power of reading—altogether. Since the publication of "Lyrical Studies" by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins in 1999, scholars have reinvigorated their understanding of the figure of the Poetess and the genre of the lyric. Foreshadowing the extensive histories [End Page 217] presented in The Lyric Theory Reader (2014), Jackson and Prins describe the nineteenth century as "a century when the negotiation between classical and vernacular literacy is further played out between England and America, and when the woman of letters emerges alongside the man of letters to play the role of mediator in the negotiation" (522-23). The Poetess "circulates from the late eighteenth century onward as an increasingly empty figure: not a lyric subject to be reclaimed as an identity but a medium for cultural exchange, a...